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‘It was.’
‘The last time you saw Bryan – heading north up the shoreline – presumably you saw him from behind?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was definitely him?’
‘Yes.’
‘After sixteen years, you see him from behind in the water as a fret’s coming in, and it was definitely him?’
Through the windscreen, Anna saw a fox appear beneath a street lamp before sliding across the garden onto number four’s drive – momentarily illuminated by the same security lights that the Deanes had at number two; that all the houses on Marine Drive probably had.
The Inspector sighed, looking at her. ‘What happened sixteen years ago?’
‘Nothing happened,’ she said smoothly, almost believing it herself.
‘But you and Laura Deane were close up until then?’
‘We grew up together.’
‘And Bryan Deane?’
‘We all lived next door to each other. Me – Laura – Bryan.’
‘So Laura and Bryan Deane were childhood sweethearts?’
‘Something like that.’ She turned away from him. ‘Then what happened?’
‘We grew apart. They stayed. I left.’
‘You didn’t keep in touch?’
Anna shook her head. ‘Like I said – I l-l-left.’
It took a while to get the word out, but the Inspector didn’t look away. He kept his eyes on her – she felt them.
‘Only nobody ever does, do they? Not completely, I mean. Childhood’s a place you can never go back to, but you never fully escape from it either. Where did you go – when you left?’
‘King’s College, London.’
‘You didn’t have to answer that.’
‘I know.’
It was warm inside the car now, and the clock said 01:22.
‘What did you study? You don’t have to answer that either.’
‘Criminology and French.’
He smiled suddenly at her. ‘What?’
‘Nothing. Have you ever seen Martha Deane before?’
‘Only in photographs.’
‘Only in photographs,’ he repeated, quietly.
They were both thinking about the way Martha had come running through the rain towards her.
‘We had a call earlier from a security guard at the international ferry terminal on the south side of the Tyne – he thought he saw a body in the water.’ Laviolette was watching Anna as he said it. ‘You put a call out and people start taking every bit of driftwood they see for a body. Coastguard got a call earlier from a woman at Cullercoats who claimed she saw a body in the water – turned out to be a log.’
Anna was aware that she was holding her breath.
‘Well, the security guard did see a body – but not our body.’
She exhaled as quietly as she could while the Inspector clicked up the lid of the CD storage unit by the handbrake.
There was only one CD in there.
‘Can I ask you something?’ she said, turning to look at him. ‘This has been assessed medium to high risk, hasn’t it?’
‘After hearing your statement, I’m escalating it to high,’ he concluded heavily. ‘The sea temperature was around eight degrees Celcius today. The fifty percent immersion survival time for a normally clothed person in reasonable health with no underlying medical conditions is two hours.’
‘He wasn’t in the sea, he was in a kayak – and he was wearing a wet suit.’
Laviolette tried to prop his elbow on the window, but there was too much condensation. ‘How would you describe your relationship to Bryan Deane?’
‘Friend of the family,’ she said, automatically.
‘Did suicide ever cross your mind?’
‘No.’
‘Said with conviction.’ He was smiling again now, a light smile that broke up his face into a network of fine lines. ‘Why not? You saw Bryan Deane for the first time today in over sixteen years, and you’d rule out suicide? What makes you so sure?’
‘Martha. I saw them together this morning.’
Anna saw again – the tall girl in riding clothes with hair the colour she remembered Laura’s being as a child, standing on the grass verge beside her father, not much shorter.
Bryan had his arm round her shoulders and Martha had gripped onto it while staring sullenly at Anna, hitting her crop against the sole of her boot.
‘They seemed really connected. I don’t know.’ She shrugged irritably, aware that the Inspector was smiling at her still. ‘I just can’t imagine him leaving her behind.’ She paused, turning to him. ‘You’re seriously considering the possibility that the disappearance is voluntary?’
‘I don’t know much about Bryan Deane, but I do know that he’s Area Manager at Tyneside Properties and that Tyneside Properties have had to shut down two of their branches in the past nine months. Then I hear that he owns an apartment overlooking the marina down at Royal Quays in North Shields that’s been on the market for months. Then tonight – as I’m heading home, I hear Bryan Deane’s disappeared, and I find that interesting.’ He waited for her to say something, rubbing the condensation from the window and staring up at the Deanes’ house. ‘I wonder what’s going on in there now,’ he said. The downstairs had gone dark, but there were lights on upstairs. ‘Not a lot of love lost between those two. Mother and daughter, I mean.’
Anna remained silent.
‘A sad house,’ he concluded tonelessly, turning to her. ‘Why d’you think that is?’
‘A man’s disappeared.’
He shook his head. ‘That wasn’t what I meant. The sadness was underlying. Invasive.’
‘Invasive?’ She smiled.
‘It’s funny, isn’t it – the things people end up wanting out of life.’
Ignoring this – it was too ambivalent, and she was too exhausted – she said, ‘They were in shock.’
‘Martha Deane was – yes.’
‘And Laura Deane,’ Anna insisted, unsure why she suddenly felt the need to insist on this when she hadn’t believed it herself. ‘There’s no right way to show shock – you know that.’
‘I think Laura Deane was enjoying the attention – to a point.’
Even though she agreed with him, Anna didn’t comment on this. She’d sensed the same thing – as well as a mixture of anxiety and what could only be described as excitement coming off Laura, but she didn’t mention this either. Partly because she felt the Inspector already knew these things, and partly because she hadn’t yet made up her mind about Inspector Laviolette. She didn’t know how she felt about Laura either, but there was definitely an old childish loyalty there, which surprised her. To put it another way, she didn’t feel quite ready to sacrifice Laura to the Inspector – not until she was certain of a few more facts herself.
‘And I’d like to see Bryan Deane’s life insurance policy,’ the Inspector added. When this provoked no response either, he said, ‘Who are you protecting?’
‘Myself.’ Looking at the clock in the dashboard, she said, ‘For the past twenty minutes I’ve been unable to shake the impression that I’m somehow under suspicion.’
‘Of what?’
Then his phone started ringing. He checked the caller and switched it off, looking momentarily much older. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he said. Then, ‘I might want to call you again.’
‘DS Chambers has got my details.’
He hesitated then dropped the phone back into his coat pocket.
Anna got out of the car.
The rain was easing off, and she was about to shut the door when she said, ‘Laviolette’s an unusual name.’
‘Not to me it isn’t.’
She looked up instinctively at the house and he followed her gaze. There was a curtain moving at the window above the front porch, as if it had just been dropped back into place.
‘D’you want to know something I noticed?’
She stood waiting by the car.
Even though the rain was easing off, her hair and face felt wet and there was a fine dusting of water over the front of her jumper still.
‘Laura Deane’s not half as upset by Bryan Deane’s disappearance as you are.’
The yellow Ford Capri turned out of the Duneside development and headed north up the coastal road. There were soon high dunes running alongside the car beyond Anna’s right shoulder as the beam from St Mary’s lighthouse flashed precisely over treacherous waters and, inland, over a betrayed country that was only just getting to its knees again. It wasn’t yet standing, but it was at least kneeling and this was what determined local councillors wanted people to know as they set about transforming the past into heritage with the smattering of civic art that had sprung up – like the quayside statue outside the apartment in Blyth that she’d taken a short-term let on.
She took the Links Road past the Royal Northumberland Yacht Club and warehouses on South Harbour before turning into Ridley Avenue, which ran past the recently regenerated Ridley Park. It was where the medical men used to live and practice and was once nicknamed Doctors’ Row, even though the houses weren’t built as one, low strung, continuous line of brick like the miners’. The houses on Ridley Avenue were detached with gardens to the front and back; gardens with lawns, and borders of flowers, not vegetables.
But the medical men were long gone and all she saw now were poky façades covered in pebbledash, while the original stained glass rising suns – still there in some of the thickset front doors – looked more like they were setting.
She drove slowly down Bridge Street and Quay Road before parking outside the newly converted-to-flats Ridley Arms overlooking the Quayside at Blyth Harbour. Her apartment – open plan in accordance with contemporary notions of constant surveillance – was the only one occupied, even though the re-development of the old harbourside pub into four luxury apartments (the hoardings advertising them were up on the main road still) had been completed nine months ago. But then the kind of people the apartments had been built for didn’t exist in Blyth – in Tynemouth maybe or Newcastle, but not Blyth. Blyth wasn’t a place people re-located or retired to; it was a place people were born in and stayed. Being born here was the only guarantee for growing to love a landscape so scarred by man it couldn’t ask to be loved.
Someone close by was burning a coal fire. It was the smell of her childhood and it hung heavy in the last of the fret. What was left was clinging to the masts of the blue and white Scottish trawlers, but most of the harbour’s north wall was visible now and there was a sharp brightness coming from the Alcan dock where aluminium was unloaded for smelting at the Alcan plant. Anna could just make out the red light at the pier end, as well as the thick white trunks of the wind turbines on the north wall – stationary, silent, and sentient.
She was back where she’d started.
Chapter 4
Laura was above her, barefoot, wearing pink and white velour shorts and a grey T-shirt, which had grass stains on the back and a Bugs Bunny transfer on the front – cracked because it was her favourite T-shirt and it had been over-washed. A light tan took the edge off the cuts and bruises running the length of her legs – legs that were swinging away from the branch Anna’s hands, hesitant, were reaching out for.
Anna wasn’t trying to catch up; she was concentrating all her efforts on keeping going – up; up – and she wasn’t barefoot like Laura. She was wearing red plastic basket weave slipons because she’d seen too many crawling things in the bark of the tree to want to go barefoot. The shoes had good grip – it wasn’t the shoes that were slowing her down, it was her constant need to peer up into the tree in an attempt not only to ascertain how she was going to get up it, but how she was going to get back down.
Laura didn’t need to do this – and only occasionally flicked her head upwards. She wasn’t interested in the views either as they got higher.
But Anna was.
Anna kept stopping to take in the Cheviot hills in the distance and, down below, their two tents pitched on the fringes of the tree’s shadow at the bend in the river. She could see Erwin, standing in the river with his trousers rolled up to his knees, fishing. Mary was lying on their green and blue check picnic rug on the bank, reading a book from the library – a wartime romance set in the backstreets of Liverpool. Anna could see the sun reflecting off her reading glasses.
The tree was oak.
They’d camped under it for the past two summers, but Erwin always forgot to mark the spot on the map so it took them a while to re-discover it each year. It was off the main road that cut across country to Jedburgh, down a single track road with four fords, and up a farm track. Anna had a feeling that Erwin forgot to mark it on the map on purpose because if they put a pencil cross on the Ordnance Survey map and gave the spot a grid reference it would somehow be bad luck and then it might really disappear. They’d found the spot by accident – if they left it alone, it would be there for them next summer.
The summer the Fausts took Laura with them and the girls climbed the tree turned out to be the last summer they’d ever go there, but they didn’t know that then.
Oaks make good climbers, but not even Erwin could reach the lower branches of this one so he’d driven into nearby Rothbury and bought rope from a hardware store, hanging it from the lowest branch and tying in knots for hand and foot holds. Once they were up, Laura started rhythmically swinging away from Anna, leaving her to follow.
Now Laura was at the top, sitting with one arm round the trunk that was almost narrow enough for her to hug. She was peering down through the tree, her hair hanging round her, too thick even for the sunlight to get through. Pleased with herself, she laughed suddenly and Anna saw Erwin, standing in the river, turn round and look up at the tree, his hand cupped against his forehead, shielding his eyes from the sun.
‘Come and look,’ Laura called out.
The sun was bouncing frantically off whatever it was she was holding in her hand – a penknife – then the next minute she leant into the tree and carved something into the trunk.
Anna started to climb again with renewed determination until a shadow – a large, loud, moving shadow – cut through the sunshine, and the branches at the top of the tree began to shake aggressively as if they’d suddenly woken up to the fact that two trespassers were among them. She heard shouting from below and, looking down, saw that Erwin was no longer in the river but on the grass, running towards the tree, his trousers rolled up at the knee still. Mary’s book lay open on the rug and she was standing staring helplessly up at the sky.
There was a helicopter hovering above them – it had come to take Laura away only Laura was too busy carving her initials into the trunk of the tree to notice.
Anna tried to call out, but the helicopter was too loud, getting louder . . .
She woke up suddenly, and thought at first that the sound was the wind turbines on the north harbour wall – then she remembered. The sound she could hear – the sound that had cut through her dream – was the sound of helicopters. It was Easter Sunday and they were searching for Bryan Deane because Bryan Deane had gone missing.
The light in the bedroom was dull, which made her think it was still early when in fact – grabbing at the pile of clothes by the side of the bed and shaking them until her watch and phone fell out – it was almost half ten.
Putting on the watch, she lay back on the pillow for a while, staring at the ceiling, then got out of bed, her legs heavy.
She walked to the window through the pile of clothes she’d dropped back on the floor and pulled up the blind. Pressing her forehead and the palm of one hand against the cold glass, she took in the rolling grey sky and sea, a fair part of which was taken up by one of the endless succession of super tankers either bringing coal from Poland or Norwegian wood pulp across the North Sea for the British press to turn into newspapers. Her mother, Bettina, used to work in the offices at South Harbour and Erwin, drunk, once told Anna that her father was a Norwegian from one of the ships.
It was dirty weather – squalid; nothing like yesterday – and the sea had an inhospitable rolling swell of about six feet.
A hard sea to survive in, Anna thought.
Through the glass she could hear the cabling on the trawlers moored to the quayside down below, ringing. The third trawler, Flora’s Fancy, was making its way between the pierheads and out into open sea past the wind turbines, which were turning today – all except the one second from the end on the left by the old coal staithes. There was always one that stood still and silent no matter how hard the others turned.
Just then a red Coastguard helicopter flew over the trawler and turbines, heading straight out to sea before turning and looping southwards back inland.
Anna went into the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of muesli – making a mental note to shop at some point – as another helicopter went overhead.
It wasn’t the Coastguard this time, but an RAF Rescue helicopter that would have come from the base at Kinross.
Then her phone started ringing.
She went into the bedroom where she’d left it – it was Laviolette, sooner than she’d expected. Forgetting what he’d said to her before slamming the door of the Vauxhall shut in the early hours of the morning, she asked quickly, ‘Has anything come in yet?’
‘Nothing. We’ve launched a full scale open search with MCA collaboration this morning. Conditions aren’t great, but they’re meant to be getting better. Boats have gone out from Tynemouth, Cullercoats and Blyth, and a couple of private fishing vessels have volunteered to assist.’ He hesitated as if about to ask her something then changed his mind. ‘But nothing’s come in yet.’
In the silence that followed there was the sound of furniture moving, a child whining and Laviolette’s voice, talking to the child, making an effort to soften itself.
‘I can hear helicopters – down the line. Where are you?’ he asked abruptly.
Caught off guard, she said, ‘My flat. I just saw the Coastguard and RAF helicopters go out to sea.’
‘You’ve got a sea view? South Harbour or Quayside?’
‘Quayside,’ she said, wondering how he knew she was in Blyth.
He paused, but didn’t comment on this. ‘I’ve got a feeling Martha Deane might try to contact you. If she does that I want you to let me know.’ Without giving her time to respond to this, he carried on, ‘Did you call Laura Deane yet?’
‘No.’ Anna wasn’t sure she was going to call Laura Deane.
‘Did she call you?’
‘No.’
‘Okay, well – we’ll speak, and don’t forget to call me if you get any visitors.’
Laviolette ended the call, and Anna, forgetting the half eaten bowl of muesli in the other room, decided to go for a run. She was about to leave the apartment when the phone started ringing again. This time it was Mary – Erwin had had a bad night, and wasn’t any better this morning.
‘Have you phoned the hospital?’
‘They say to come in, but he says he doesn’t want to. It’s his breathing, Anna.’
‘I’m phoning the hospital. I’ll see if they can send someone to you and if they can’t he’s going to have to go in. Does he have a patient number – reference number – anything I need to quote when I phone?’
‘I don’t know,’ Mary said, close to tears. ‘I don’t know any more. Don and Doreen have gone over to be with Laura – she still hasn’t had any news. It’s hard to believe –’ Mary broke off. The improbability of Bryan Deane’s disappearance had fractured her resolve with regards to Erwin’s cancer, and right now she wasn’t coping.
‘Smoker’s cancer’ was how her grandmother, Mary, had referred to the small cell lung cancer Erwin had been diagnosed with. After nearly forty years underground on twenty to thirty cigarettes a day, Mary wasn’t surprised, and implied that Anna shouldn’t be either. It was how women of Mary’s generation were used to losing their men. They hadn’t wanted to tell her, but –
‘But it might only be weeks, pet.’ Mary’s voice cracking ever so slightly.
It was the ‘pet’ that did it – not the news of Erwin’s imminent death, but the ‘pet’. Anna was crying; something she rarely did. Or at least, the tears were running, but she wasn’t making any sound.
‘I’m sorry, pet, but I thought you should know.’
Then came the hours of phone calls to the specialist and primary care team.
Erwin’s cancer was ‘metastatic’, the medical term for ‘hopeless’. There was no hope for Erwin. There was no point his having surgery or even radiotherapy because the cancer was no longer confined, but spreading. He’d been given the course of chemotherapy not as a potential cure, but to ease the pain of his ending.
According to the specialist, Erwin didn’t want any more chemotherapy so they were putting him on morphine tablets instead.
That was when Anna had left London and headed north for the first time in just over a year. She’d had extensive conversations with various cancer specialists and had driven up the M1 feeling vaguely determined and prepared. Mary’s phone call had enabled her to unplug herself from her London life in a way she’d been attempting but failing to for some months now, she realised.
As she pushed on at eighty miles an hour past Northampton, Nottingham, Leeds, York, Durham she wondered if this was what she’d been waiting for . . . an excuse to come back. But, come back to what?
When she pulled up in the late afternoon outside the council house that was her childhood home – number nineteen Parkview – Mary seemed confused, distant, and almost embarrassed.
She’d gone into the kitchenette to make tea and left Anna to face Erwin alone after calling out, ‘Anna’s here,’ making it sound like she’d travelled hardly any distance at all.
Erwin was sitting on the sofa in the lounge beneath the framed copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle. He was watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, his mouth open – smiling. His clothes looked too big and his skin was grey. There were some specks of dried blood on his upper lip from an earlier nose bleed, and he was wearing a cap because of hair loss from the chemotherapy.
‘Granddad!’ By the time she said it, she’d been standing in the lounge doorway for what seemed like ages.
He’d looked up – reluctantly – from the cartoon, still smiling, still rubbing his hands together where the skin had gone dry between thumb and forefinger.
‘Alright, pet,’ he said automatically, as if she’d just come from upstairs or the kitchenette. He tried to engage in her, but he wasn’t really that interested. In fact, he was almost impatient, waiting for her to leave the room; the house . . . go back to London. The man who’d loved her all her life.
It struck Anna that neither of them wanted her here; that they were embarrassed about Erwin dying with her there. Alone, together, they knew how to behave with each other, and with death in the house, but they didn’t know how to behave with her there.
She didn’t know what to say and, leaving him in front of Tom and Jerry, went into the kitchenette, closing the door gently behind her.
Mary tensed, but carried on putting the teapot on the table next to the tea set that usually lived in the china cabinet in the lounge.
She sat down at the small drop-leaf table and poured their tea.
Anna noted, relieved, that the table was set for two.
Erwin, who’d never watched daytime TV in his life before, was left in front of Tom and Jerry.
‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ Anna said at last when Mary showed no signs of breaking the silence other than to ask if she’d had a good journey up, and how work was.
She finished her mouthful slowly, prudishly. ‘We didn’t know ourselves until recently.’
‘Well, why didn’t you tell me when you knew?’
‘What could you of done?’ Mary let out, angry. ‘What can you do now? What are you going to do? What are you doing here?’ she finished, exasperated and suddenly tearful. ‘He’s dying.’
‘I know,’ Anna said, angry herself now; raising her voice. Only she hadn’t known; not really; not until she’d seen him on the sofa just now in front of Tom and Jerry. The man who’d been a father to her, and who’d been so strong still even at the age of fifty when she was born; who she’d always thought of as invincible.