SARAH MAY

The Missing Marriage

This book is dedicated to George Gowans and Robert Hutchinson, who spent too long underground . . . and to the women they left behind.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise for Sarah May’s novels

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Anna Faust saw Bryan Deane three times the day he disappeared – twice on land, and once in the sea. There was nothing remarkable about this. A lot of people saw Bryan the day he disappeared – people who knew him as Bryan Deane, and people who didn’t. The fact that Anna saw him six months later near the old bandstand on South beach – newly painted in a retina jumping white – was remarkable. It was remarkable because only the day before the Blyth coroner had announced an open verdict on the disappearance of Bryan Deane on Saturday 11 April 2008 – Easter Saturday – age thirty-five.

Bryan Deane was officially missing presumed dead the day Anna saw him on South beach.

His brown hair, which used to have natural auburn highlights when the sun caught it, had been bleached Scandinavian blond. He’d lost about two stone in weight as well, which had the effect of making him look taller.

The man Anna saw that day – the only other person on the beach apart from herself and a bundled up woman yelling at a black Labrador standing motionless in the long rolling sea – looked nothing like Bryan Deane, but she recognised him immediately despite the distance between them. She felt him in her stomach and lungs as a rising nausea, which was where she had always felt Bryan Deane ever since she first laid eyes on him in the summer of 1985 when she was eleven and he was twelve. It was how she felt him six months ago after seeing him for the first time in sixteen years, stood next to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Martha, the day he disappeared.

And when she saw him on South beach, the day after the coroner’s verdict was given, it didn’t surprise her; it was confirmation of what she had somehow known all along – Bryan Deane hadn’t disappeared so much as failed to return . . . as Bryan Deane, anyway.

But then men – and occasionally women – have disappeared under circumstances far more infamous than those surrounding Bryan Deane; so infamous, in fact, that they have gone down in history.

Take Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who mounted his donkey one night as sixth Fatimid Caliph and sixteenth Ismaili Imam, and rode into the al-Muqattan hills outside Cairo – only to dismount from the same donkey as somebody completely different. Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah was never seen or heard of again.

Tsar Alexander I went so far as to die at Tagarog and be interred at the St Peter and Paul Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg – all so that he could go on living life, in one version of the story anyway, as Feodor Kuzmich in Siberia. When Soviet authorities opened Alexander’s tomb in 1925, it was empty.

Who knows what prompted Ducat, Marshal and the Occasional – all three of them lighthouse keepers on Flannan Isles – to vacate their lives so suddenly one day that they left their beds unmade, the clocks stopped, a chair overturned by the kitchen table, and one set of oilskins hanging still from their peg? And who thought to ask John Stonehouse whether he preferred life as John Stonehouse, Labour MP, or – following the collapse of his companies, revelations about his extra-marital affair, and his own drowning – as a man called Joe Markham?

As Anna Faust walked into the Deanes’ house – and marriage – on Easter Saturday 2008, she knew that disappearances were classified as victimless crimes. But where did that leave Bryan’s stunned yet immaculate, highlighted blonde wife, Laura? Or his daughter, Martha?

Even the Spaniel, Roxy, sprawled impartially over Laura Deane’s carefully positioned feet, had rolling eyes as she attempted to grapple with the notion – both instinctive and observed – that an event of such seismic significance had occurred that Laura had forgotten to feed her. Laura had also sat on her where she lay curled up and blinking in the corner of the sofa, waiting patiently for Strictly Come Dancing to be switched on. Not only sat on her, but become uncharacteristically furious. Laura really wasn’t herself tonight, Roxy thought.

Then the police arrived.

Chapter 1

It was almost midnight when Doreen Hamilton stepped through the front door to number seventeen Parkview and pulled it shut behind her. Holding onto the latch, she swung her body – buttoned up from throat to ankles in a quilted dressing gown that had been a Christmas gift from her daughter, Laura – away from her home of over fifty years into the night. Panting, she peered blindly through the retreating fret at the only thing she could see – the streetlight growing out of the pavement on the other side of the garden wall – and let go of the latch.

Keeping the orange streetlight to her left, she shuffled in slippers – which predated the dressing gown by a year and which had a navy blue fleur de lys Doreen had never seen embroidered on them – along the front of the house, feeling her way.

When she ran out of house, she turned left – the orange light was ahead of her now – following the path until she reached the gate. It was a relief to feel its solid wood beneath her hands, and she stood there for a moment running her fingers nimbly over the edges of a sign made for them by their granddaughter, Martha, in more innocent times. She’d never seen the sign – she’d never seen the pink and yellow patio tiles paving the garden either or the stone wishing well and oak barrel planter where a relatively robust looking dwarf conifer was growing, circled by primroses – but she knew what it said: No leaflets or junk mail.

Her breath was quick and hissing. She could hear it – a sound close by – as she clicked up the latch and opened the gate. Out on the pavement there were other sounds – sounds that didn’t belong here on the edges of the Hartford Estate where families wanting to stay afloat above the tide of social debris put in for transfers to; where vegetables were grown, laundry dried outside, and windows cleaned. The sounds came from the centre of the estate – a primitive black hole with severed amenities, boarded-up windows and bonfires burning day and night – where things had gone bad.

Feeling suddenly fretful, Doreen felt out the gate to the house next door, number nineteen, where the Fausts lived. The Fausts and the Hamiltons had been among the estate’s first residents in 1954, and so proud of their new council homes that they threw parties for less fortunate friends and family still consigned to the damp, crowded miners’ rows.

There was a nail on the left hand post she remembered not to snag the sleeve of her dressing gown on; she also remembered that the Fausts’ gate had sunk on its hinges and needed lifting slightly. She remembered all this despite the succession of low-strung whimpering sounds she was making as she shuffled blindly – the orange streetlight was behind her now – up the garden path to number nineteen Parkview, her hands moving in slow nervous arcs.

She had no idea how long the journey between houses had taken her. Since losing her sight, things needed to be sought out, felt out . . . translated. Things took time.

She rang on the bell to number nineteen, her right palm flat against the door, overcome by the physical reverberations of relief at reaching her destination. She listened – and thought she heard the sounds of a bed giving up its sleeper; uncertain footsteps. Crouching down awkwardly, she opened the letterbox and shouted hoarsely through it – ‘Mary, it’s me – Doreen!’

She could smell the new gloss on the front door; she could even smell the green in it as she straightened up slowly, her left hand pulling on the collar of her dressing gown. The last time she’d knocked on Mary Faust’s door at midnight – on anyone’s door at midnight – was the night Laura was born. She’d been told she couldn’t have children, then in 1974 – unexpectedly at the age of forty-two – she became pregnant. She never did make it to the hospital. Laura was born on the bathroom floor at number nineteen – delivered by a shaking, incredulous Mary.

The door to number nineteen opened then and the quality of light changed.

Mary Faust, in a dressing gown not dissimilar to Doreen’s – the small tight curls on her head flattened by the hair net she was wearing – peered with concern, and just a shiver of hostility, at her virtually blind neighbour.

Doreen was clutching the collar of her dressing gown. Her mouth looked like broken knicker elastic and the hair on the right-hand side of her head – hair tinted with just a suggestion of purple – was flat with sleep still. Mary wanted to ask her why she wasn’t wearing a hair net, but it was midnight and Doreen didn’t look like she was up to having an opinion on hair nets right then.

‘Doreen?’ Mary patted her own hair, satisfied. Doreen was staring straight through her, panting strangely. ‘Doreen, pet?’ Mary prompted her. The ‘pet’ was condescending, but she felt that Doreen’s frailty, virtual blindness and possible dementia warranted it.

‘It’s Bryan –’ Doreen said at last.

Mary stared at her, trying to work out whether she was sleepwalking. It was difficult to tell with a blind person. ‘Bryan?’

‘Laura’s Bryan. He’s gone missing. She’s just phoned. The police are there now.’

‘Bryan?’ Mary said again. It seemed impossible to her, given all the Deanes had achieved – Laura Hamilton had become Laura Deane when she married Bryan. Achievements such as theirs – they owned and lived in a four-bedroom detached house, and ran two cars – were meant to safeguard against tragedy. ‘Missing how?’

‘I don’t know. Laura said he never came home.’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know. Something to do with a kayak. He was in the sea, and – I can’t help thinking –.’

‘Don’t think,’ Mary commanded. ‘It’ll give you vertigo, and you’ll feel it in your joints. Where’s Don?’ Mary couldn’t see the car where it was usually parked beneath the street light.

‘He’s driven over there. He took Martha with him.’

Martha was Laura and Bryan’s fifteen-year-old daughter. She stayed with her grandparents most weekends.

‘You’d better come in,’ Mary said, taking hold of Doreen’s arm and pulling her into the house.

‘I didn’t mean to bother you. Not with Erwin ill . . .’

‘He’s out cold. Morphine.’

Mary was almost cheerful now as she pushed Doreen gently into the living room, guiding her to the sofa beneath the copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle.

Doreen poised rigidly on the edge, her left hand curled in her lap, her right hand gripping the armrest as if anticipating motion. She could smell carpet and the wood of the sideboard – as well as Lily of the Valley vapours from a bath Mary had taken earlier. She was breathless with disbelief still – even after telling Mary, who she could hear now making tea in the kitchenette.

There were other sounds – a man and woman making love – coming through the wall behind her from next door where a young family lived; a nice family, just trying to make their way in the world. Doreen felt briefly glad for them, then the panic set in again as she thought about Laura, who used to be such a happy little girl. Shocked, Doreen realised that subconsciously she must have noticed that lately Laura hadn’t been happy; Laura hadn’t been happy at all, but this wasn’t something they ever talked about because they didn’t talk about much these days.

She felt a sudden, inexplicable resentment towards Laura then, which had something to do with the dressing gown she was wearing and how much she’d always disliked it. She’d disliked it for being exactly what it was – an ugly, synthetic body bag she was meant to express senile thanks for because she was at the end of her life. It had been chosen carelessly and at the last minute – from the racks of a shop Laura would never have bought anything for herself in. When had she, Doreen, ever given the impression that silk had lost its meaning now she was over seventy? Doreen started to cry.

Mary stood in the kitchenette – her hand on the teapot; about to pour – on the phone to her granddaughter, Anna. Not only because Anna was police, but because she, Laura and Bryan had all grown up together here on the Hartford Estate.

Laura and Anna had lived next door to each other since birth, and as both of them remained only children a friendship would have been natural enough, but it had been more than friendship. They sought each other out intentionally and, growing up, they were inseparable – their own world – until the summer after the eleven plus, which Anna passed and Laura didn’t.

Mary had been telling herself for the past twenty-three years that it was the eleven plus that came between Laura and Anna, but it wasn’t – that same summer, the summer of ’85, the Deanes moved onto the Hartford Estate. They moved into number fifteen Parkview, next door to the Hamiltons. Bryan Deane was twelve at the time – a year older than Anna and Laura.

As she came off the phone, she heard crying on the other side of the frosted glass door separating the kitchenette from the living room.

She went through, her feet silent in the carpet’s thick pile.

Doreen’s skin was too loose and thin to absorb the tears whose run-off was cascading from the edge of her chin onto her dressing gown.

‘I’ve come out without my keys and there’s nobody at home. I’m locked out, Mary,’ she said – as if this failing on her part far outweighed her son-in-law’s disappearance. ‘Stupid – stupid,’ she moaned, distraught with anger, thumping her left fist into her lap.

Anna Faust slowed down, steering the yellow Ford Capri, in which she’d driven north the previous Saturday, into the small Duneside development outside Seaton Sluice where the Deanes lived. A wind was picking up, making the flags ring on their masts at the entrance to the estate while shifting the sea fret that had come in with the tide that afternoon – a dense, rolling blanket of fog this stretch of the north-east coast was famous for.

It was Easter Saturday and unnaturally quiet after London – something she hadn’t got used to yet.

Marine Drive was a road of four- and five-bedroom detached homes whose uniform banality could only be described as ‘executive’ – a marketing ploy that explained nothing and promised everything. The houses backed onto the main road, but had sea views.

The Deanes’ house – the first one, number two – was as honey-coloured as the rest of the houses on Marine Drive, which all gave the impression that they’d been tailored to suit the needs of their owners when in fact it was the owners who’d been trained – by forces far greater than themselves – to fulfil the requirements of the houses. Requirements including, but not limited to – Anna took a glance at number two and its immediate neighbours – a household income of at least eighty thousand, and a minimum of two cars to fill the double garage and drive. Preferably children – definitely pets.

After more than a decade in London ‘eighty thousand’ had lost its meaning, but up here it was still hard to come by – still currency.

She cast her eyes instinctively over the puddles of architectural foliage in the front garden of number two, then back up at the honey-coloured façade, aware that she was looking for signs of Bryan in all this.

Anna hadn’t seen Bryan or Bryan’s wife, Laura, since she and Laura were eighteen when Laura Deane had been Laura Hamilton still. But she knew all about the Deanes and their house at number two Marine Drive – Mary had described it in such breathless detail – because Mary approved of the Deanes and the way the Deanes lived their lives in a way she didn’t approve of Anna.

At Friday’s Methodist Church coffee morning, Mary would talk loudly and insistently about her granddaughter, Anna, and while she was talking, still loudly, still proudly, she was trying simultaneously to fathom why it was Anna lived so far away, and why it was Anna lived alone.

She’d always been ambitious for her granddaughter, but Anna’s achievements didn’t translate into anything she – or anybody else at the Methodist Church coffee morning – understood. While Laura Deane had a four-bedroom house with a conservatory and separate utility room. She had a beautiful kitchen with an in-built microwave the size of an oven. People understood these things, and such recognisable achievements were given their due reverence by the Friday morning audience.

Unlike the Hartford Estate – where Anna, Laura, and Bryan had all grown up and where Anna’s grandparents and Laura’s parents still lived – Marine Drive didn’t often see police squad cars, but tonight there was one parked on the drive to number two, sandwiched between two other cars. One of those Anna recognised as belonging to Laura’s father, Don Hamilton, and the other one had to be Laura’s.

Don – like Erwin Faust – used to work at Hartford Pit, and when that closed down Don got work at Bates and Erwin, who was near retirement, got work cleaning the buses at the Ashington Depot. He was still referred to locally as ‘the German’ by the older generation because he’d spent most of the war as a POW in Camp Eden, Stanton.

As she got out of her car, sensor-triggered security lighting suddenly illuminated the driveway and front garden of number two and she saw Don Hamilton walking towards his car.

‘Don!’

He stared at her, not recognising her for a moment. ‘Anna?’

‘Nan’s just phoned – about Bryan.’

As if embarrassed at this disturbance of the peace his family was responsible for, Don shook his head, which had been sporting the same Teddy boy haircut for as long as Anna had known him.

He’d put on a shirt, pressed trousers, sports jacket and loafers – with buckles that shone under the security lighting – in order to face the unexpected tragedy of his son-in-law’s disappearance. It disturbed Don profoundly because he didn’t think things like this happened to people who lived in four-bedroom detached houses. He thought his daughter was safe from harm inside number two Marine Drive, but here was a police car parked on the drive where Bryan’s 4x4 should have been.

‘You didn’t have to come over.’

‘Don, it’s fine.’

Anna didn’t tell him she’d come to give a statement because when Mary phoned just after midnight, it occurred to her – beyond the shock – that she was probably the last person to have seen Bryan, that afternoon on the beach.

‘The police are in there speaking to Laura – asking questions.’

‘They’ll just be routine ones,’ Anna reassured him. He looked like he needed reassuring. He looked, in fact, as though someone had been stamping all over his face, and he was trying hard not to bear any grudges.

‘They sounded bloody weird to me – some of them.’

‘It’s not easy, I know, but they have to ask them.’

Don wasn’t listening any more. ‘They wanted to search the house as well.’

‘It’s just routine – standard procedure. It’s what they do.’

‘Well, I didn’t think it was right for Martha to hear all of that. I wanted her to wait in the car with me, but she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to be there when they were speaking to Laura. They asked her questions as well – Martha.’

Anna had seen the Deanes’ fifteen-year-old daughter for the first time that morning – dressed in riding clothes with a brown velvet hat hooked under her arm, hitting lightly at the side of her boots with a crop. A tall, shy girl, who had stood possessively close to Bryan on the pavement outside number seventeen Parkview on the Hartford Estate.

Don stared helplessly at Anna. ‘She’s in her pyjamas still. I drove her over in her pyjamas. Saturdays she stays with us – I take her to Keenley’s Stables.’ He ran his tongue nervously round his mouth. ‘Laura and Bryan have to work Saturdays, but I suppose it gives them a bit of time together afterwards – just the two of them,’ he finished, uncertain.

Anna gave his elbow a squeeze, surprised to find, standing next to him, that they were the same height. She’d always thought of Don as a towering man. ‘You get on home. This business with Bryan will sort itself out.’

She stood on the drive and waited for him to put the car into gear and reverse, then move off slowly up the street, obedient to the twenty miles per hour speed limit – and not because she was watching. Don was the sort of man who stuck to the rules even when there was nobody watching.

Just the two of them.

Anna had a sudden image of Bryan turning sharply onto the drive she was standing on, laughing, Laura leaning heavily into him. She saw them kissing and touching each other then Bryan switching off the engine and pulling Laura out of the car towards the silent house – Laura holding onto him as he fumbled with the key in the lock.

All three of them – Bryan, Laura, and Anna – knew what it was like to grow up in a mining community after the mass pit closures of the sixties through to the eighties and the Strike of ’84–5. What they’d seen growing up had given them a knowledge, and this knowledge had become an appetite for escape.

The two things everybody had plenty of in Blyth by the mid-nineties were despair and heroin, but Bryan, Laura and Anna – in their different ways – clung onto their appetites and watched for a way out. Anna’s appetite led her down to King’s College, London. Bryan’s led him to white collar work and a monthly salary, and Laura – well, Laura only had an appetite for one thing, and that was Bryan. They’d all achieved what they set out to, which was to make the unaffordable things in life affordable, and ensure that their children would never know what it was like to go hungry.

Just the two of them.

Anna crossed the drive to the front door, her finger pressing hard on the buzzer.

She’d been bewildered – when she first arrived a week ago – to find herself at this latitude again. It didn’t feel like her country any more, although it was unreasonable of her to expect it to after so many years away. Did she even want it to? She didn’t look like these people and she didn’t speak like them anymore. But she had given them her childhood and she felt, pettishly, that this should have at least entitled her to a temporary sense of belonging.

Maybe the fault didn’t lie with them, but with her – and anyway none of this mattered now.

With Bryan’s disappearance she was no longer in their world – they were in hers.

Chapter 2

It was Martha Deane who answered the door, in blue and yellow pyjamas that made her look younger than she had in her riding clothes that morning. It struck Anna again how similar to Laura she was – apart from the eyes; the eyes belonged to Bryan. Her hair had been scraped back hurriedly into a pony tail and her face looked uneven from all the crying she’d done. She started to cry again now and, turning away from Anna back into the brightly lit hallway, allowed herself to be held by a uniformed female constable who must have been standing close but out of sight up until then.

‘I’m Anna Faust – a friend of the family,’ Anna said, stepping inside number two Marine Drive.

The ceiling was punctured with high wattage halogen bulbs whose light reflected harshly off the white walls and polished wood floors so that there were no dark corners, and no shadows. The inside of the house looked like the outside had led her to expect it would. There were no surprises, and nothing that stood out as personal, which – despite the obvious space – made Anna feel claustrophobic.

‘Friend of the family,’ the constable announced as Anna followed her and Martha into a spacious sitting room where there was another officer – male, late twenties, balding, and not in uniform – and two colossal sofas facing each other across a coffee table, fireplace, mirror, and fading white bouquet.

The constable sat down in one of the sofas, her arm round Martha’s shoulders still as Martha, sniffing in an attempt to stop crying, twisted her head so that she could watch Anna.

Laura Deane was sitting in the other sofa, curled in a corner with a small chestnut Spaniel over her feet – also watching Anna, whom she hadn’t seen since they were eighteen.

A faint trace of emotion crossed Laura’s otherwise immaculate face – a face that had had work done to it: Botox, for sure, possibly a chin tuck, and the nose was definitely thinner than Anna remembered.

Laura wasn’t sitting on the sofa so much as positioned in it, and she was positioned carefully with her legs, in loose linen trousers, pulled up under her. She was wearing a tank top the same bright white as the walls to set off her spray tan, and a loose cardigan over it that looked expensive. Light reflected off the heavy jewellery hanging from her wrists and neck and the overall effect was of somebody who either spent a lot of money on themselves or who had money spent on them – maybe a combination of both.

She was as immaculate as the house around her, and gave Anna the same impression of emptiness. It made her want to ask the woman sitting on the sofa in front of her where Laura had gone. Was she keeping her hidden in the attic? Was she up there screaming and banging on the door right now – desperate to be let out? Where had the girl with the mole on her thigh and skin that turned caramel in the real sun gone? Where had the girl with the long blonde hair that was forever getting knotted with twigs and bark and leaves from the trees she climbed gone?

Maybe Laura was thinking the same thing about her.

Maybe they’d just grown up, that was all.

Only Laura, taking in Anna – she did this by barely moving her eyes and remaining otherwise expressionless – had an air of triumph about her. As though she’d just discovered that she’d won the race after all – a race Anna wasn’t even aware they’d been running.

‘Why are you here?’

Anna turned to Martha – who’d pulled herself away from the stranger in uniform she had gone to for comfort instead of her own mother – and who was now sitting upright, her knees pulled into her chest.

‘I’ve known your mum a long time.’ Anna paused. ‘And your dad as well.’

‘So? I never saw you before this morning.’

‘How long has it been?’ Laura said, carefully. ‘Sixteen years?’

‘S-s-something like that.’

Anna exhaled with relief and opened her eyes, which shut automatically whenever she lost words. Only sporadically, and in extreme circumstances, did her childhood speech impediment come back. The moment had passed – and with it the feeling that she’d been standing, momentarily, in a precipitous place.

‘I heard you’d come back. I’m sorry about Erwin.’

‘And I’m sorry – about Bryan.’

The two women stared at each other, without sympathy, aware that the only reason Anna was here, inside number two Marine Drive, was because Bryan Deane wasn’t.

‘How did you know – about Bryan?’ Laura asked calmly.

‘Nan phoned. Your mum’s been round to see her.’

‘Well, we’ve got the police here already,’ Laura carried on, still calm – articulating each word carefully in an ongoing attempt to eliminate any traces of accent in her voice.

‘Actually I came to give a statement – I saw Bryan on the beach this afternoon.’

A sense of movement passed through Laura’s body that made the Spaniel look up.

Anna swung round to the officer behind her. ‘But maybe not here,’ she added, taking in Martha who – distraught, tearful and enraged – was displaying all the by-products of shock Laura wasn’t.

‘Here’s fine,’ Laura said.

Martha said nothing.

Glancing at Laura, the officer hesitated before sitting down on a footstool covered in the same fabric as the sofa.

‘I’m Detective Sergeant Chambers,’ he said, getting out a notebook, ‘and this is Constable Wade.’

He indicated the woman in uniform on the sofa with Martha, coughed and said stiffly, ‘Excuse me,’ then, ‘which beach was that?’

‘Tynemouth Longsands.’

‘What time?’

Anna still wasn’t sure about doing this in front of Martha. ‘About half four. He was about to go out in a kayak – a P&H Quest kayak – red and black.’ She paused. ‘But you’ve probably got that already.’

She felt Martha watching her as Laura said, ‘That kayak’s been in our garage for months and I couldn’t even have told you what colour it was.’

The officer was silent for a moment. ‘Were you in a kayak?’

‘I was surfing.’

‘Had you arranged to meet?’

Laura’s head was balanced on the Spaniel’s head. The Spaniel was whimpering.

Anna wondered – briefly – what the dog was called, before turning back to DS Chambers. ‘No. It was a chance encounter.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Not in the water, no.’

‘On the beach?’

‘Not as such. Just about the weather.’

The first time she saw him that day, outside number seventeen Parkview with Martha, he looked and felt like somebody’s husband . . . somebody’s father. Standing beside her on the beach, he didn’t. They’d just looked at each other; taken each other in, and here – in front of Bryan’s wife and daughter – the recollection felt like a transgression.

There was a silence.

Laura didn’t take her eyes off Anna, who was about to speak when the silence was broken by the front door bell ringing. Checking her watch, she saw that it had just gone one. She moved position so that she could see up the hallway as Constable Wade went to open the door and a man in a Barbour jacket, soaking wet, stepped into the house.

He flicked a quick look down the corridor and it wasn’t until then that Anna became aware of Martha, standing beside her.

‘Who is it?’ Laura asked.

‘The Inspector from before,’ Martha mumbled, dis appearing back onto the sofa again.

Everyone in the room became suddenly more alert – even Laura, Anna thought, turning round. No – especially Laura.

‘Mrs Deane said just now that you last saw her – was it sixteen years ago?’ DS Chambers, speaking loudly now, swung politely towards Laura, who nodded. ‘When did you last see Mr Deane? Before today that is.’

‘It would have been around the same time – sixteen years ago.’

DS Chambers nodded heavily and looked at her.

They were all looking at her.

‘But you didn’t have anything to say – as such?’

‘I’d already seen him – and Martha,’ Anna said, turning to the Deanes’ daughter, ‘this morning over on the Hartford Estate.’ DS Chambers didn’t comment on this. ‘When I saw him on the beach we chatted about the weather conditions, which were good – until the fret came in.’

‘He didn’t say where he was going when you met him on the beach?’

‘He didn’t – no.’

‘And the next time you saw him – in the water – you didn’t speak?’

‘No.’

Anna had called out to him when she saw him in the water – in his kayak – trying to steer a course through the surfers. In the water she’d felt much lighter and more confident than she had earlier that morning, on land.

He’d looked confused for a moment then smiled quickly, paddling out to her until his kayak was in line with her board and they were both rising and falling in the waves.

His eyes had touched her briefly as she sat with her legs straddling the board then she’d laughed suddenly and given a wet wave before moving forcibly away from him; lying down on the board and paddling hard out to sea towards the cargo ship filling up so much of the distant horizon it seemed stationary.

She took in two more waves and it was while she was paddling back out after this that the sea fret came in.

Looking around instinctively for Bryan, she’d seen him heading in a direct line north away from her towards Cullercoats and St Mary’s Island – against the tide.

Then he disappeared into the fret – and some of Europe’s busiest shipping lanes.

‘When was the last time you saw him?’

‘Like I said, just as the fret was coming in – around five. He must have been about thirty metres out from shore – heading north up the coast.’

One minute the sea had been full of mostly men and some women poised in their wetsuits, looking out to sea – the next it was as though the sun had become suddenly thicker. She had felt inconsolably alone, hesitant and watchful, unable to make out any other black-suited figures in the water.

Glancing back to shore, the line of people at the edge of the beach and the dogs in the water were visible for a few seconds more then they too vanished – along with the beach, the cliffs behind, the building housing the Toy Museum and Balti Experience, and the spire of St George’s Church. She’d tried to keep the board as still in the water as she could – if the nose swung round she knew she’d lose all sense of direction. The beach sounded further away than she knew it was – the waves slapping dully against the shore and voices carrying high one moment only to be suddenly cut off the next. The tide was still coming in, she told herself, aware that the temperature was falling and that she was uncomfortably cold – all she needed to do was take any wave that came and let it carry her in.

Other surfers had the same idea and they came at each other suddenly, figures in black manoeuvring their boards through the water, slightly irate now. Nobody wanted to come off; nobody wanted to be left in the water.

When she finally got back to shore, she stood shivering on the beach, holding the board against her. The headland shielding Cullercoats Bay to the north was lost. She waited a while – for the red and black kayak to come nosing through the fret – but it never did.

‘I didn’t see him again,’ Anna said, ‘but by then I could barely see the end of my own board.’

The Inspector was standing in the doorway to the sitting room, watching her with a blank face, the skin pockmarked across the lower cheeks as though someone had repeatedly attempted to puncture him there.

‘Sir, this is Anna Faust – a friend of the family,’ DS Chambers said, starting to cough again. ‘I think we’ve got a last sighting.’

The Inspector nodded at her – Anna wondered how long he had been standing there – introducing himself in a rapid mumble as, ‘Detective Inspector Laviolette.’

His re-appearance had created a sense of expectancy, and focus.

His coat and hair were soaked with rain and Laura Deane’s eyes automatically followed the drops as they ran off his coat and onto the solid oak floor. Her eyes unconsciously checked the hallway behind him as well – for footprints – because this wasn’t a house that encouraged people to leave a trace.

‘It’s raining outside,’ he said to her. Then, suddenly, ‘D’you mind if we go over a few more things, Mrs Deane – in light of this new statement?’

He shuffled forward awkwardly, the soles of his shoes squeaking on the polished wood floor.

After a second’s hesitation and a brief smile he sat down on the same sofa as Martha, who automatically pushed herself further back into the corner.

‘Haven’t we been over everything?’

Ignoring this, Laviolette said, ‘When did Bryan say he’d be home by?’

Anna had the impression that he was doing this for her benefit – that he wanted to question Laura in front of her.

Laura took a while to answer, looking momentarily distracted – as if she had far more important things to attend to than her husband’s disappearance.

‘Around seven,’ she said, pronouncing the words as carefully as she had when she spoke to Anna before. ‘We had lunch in Tynemouth then I went into Newcastle and he took the kayak out.’

‘And you haven’t been in contact at all since lunch?’

Laura was thinking. ‘He called me – around three thirty – but that’s it.’

‘What time did you get back from Newcastle?’

Laura shrugged. ‘I can’t remember – it must have been before eight because Strictly Come Dancing’s on at eight, and we watched that.’

Turning to Martha, Laviolette said pleasantly, ‘You like Strictly Come Dancing?’

‘I think it’s shit.’

‘Martha!’ Laura interceded sharply, losing her composure for the first time.

‘When she says “we”,’ Martha explained, ‘she’s talking about the dog – Roxy. They watch it together.’

They all turned to stare at Roxy who, becoming conscious of the sudden attention, raised her head from Laura’s ankles and panted expectantly.

‘Did you check the garage when you got home – to see if his kayak or his wetsuit were there?’

‘Not until later, no.’

‘And his car wasn’t on the drive?’

‘No.’

‘When did you first try ringing Mr Deane?’ the Inspector asked after a while

‘As soon I came in and realised he wasn’t here.’

‘And he didn’t pick up?’

‘I left a message. Then I rang two of his friends – ones he sometimes meets at the pub – in case he’d gone there – and they hadn’t seen him.’

‘You’ve got their names and details?’

This was directed at DS Chambers, who’d been looking at Laura.

‘And the pub he sometimes goes to?’

‘The Shipwrights Arms,’ DS Chambers said. ‘We’ve already been there – nothing.’

‘You’ve got all this,’ Laura said, openly hostile now.

‘Sir, we’ve done a full open door search – this isn’t a voluntary disappearance.’

Inspector Laviolette turned suddenly to Anna. ‘When did you find out that Mr Deane hadn’t come home?’

‘Six minutes past midnight. Mrs Hamilton told my grandmother, who then phoned me. They’re old friends.’

‘Six minutes past midnight,’ Laviolette repeated as something close to a smile crossed his face so rapidly Anna wouldn’t have noticed it if she hadn’t been looking. ‘And then you drove over here –’

‘To give a statement. I saw Bryan Deane this afternoon down on Tynemouth Longsands – as you heard.’

Laviolette turned back to Laura, without comment.

‘So Bryan was meant to be home around seven, and you phoned his two friends roughly when?’

‘Around eight – I was worried.’

‘Around eight,’ Laviolette repeated. ‘He was an hour late at that point – when you phoned.’ The Inspector was silent for a moment. ‘Is he not usually late?’

‘He’s not – no.’ Laura’s stance was becoming increasingly defensive. ‘Look, I told you – they said he was never there. His car wasn’t on the drive and his kayak wasn’t in the garage,’ she carried on, raising her voice and looking genuinely upset. ‘He’s never not come home before. Why don’t you do something?’ she exploded. ‘Why aren’t you out there looking for him?’ She collapsed back in the sofa, her hand over her face.

Anna looked quickly at Martha, who was staring at her mother with a mixture of worry and what could only be described as hatred.

‘Look,’ the Inspector said sounding suddenly exhausted; apologetic. ‘I’m going to try and get this categorised as high risk.’

Laura, looking surprised, at last uncurled herself from the sofa and stood up, the linen falling in crumpled folds around her, the abandoned Roxy looking momentarily confused.

‘DS Chambers and Constable Wade will stay here with you. There’s a lot of procedure it’s essential you understand.’ He broke off, staring thoughtfully at Laura. ‘Did your husband have a nickname?’

‘A nickname?’ Laura shook her head, glancing quickly at Anna.

The Inspector noted the glance then turned to DS Chambers. ‘Can I have a look at what you’ve taken down?’

‘We’ve covered a lot,’ Chambers said.

Laviolette nodded absently and read through the investigation notes. ‘No distinguishing marks?’ he said, looking first at Chambers then Laura Deane. ‘No scars? Tattoos? Nothing?’

‘No,’ Chambers confirmed, sullen.

Laura said nothing.

Anna was watching her, her face momentarily tense with conflict. ‘What about the appendicitis scar?’ she said at last, appealing not to the Inspector – but Laura.

‘He never had an appendicitis,’ Laura said, her eyes on Anna again.

Feeling Martha’s eyes on her as well, Anna smiled quickly at her before turning back to Laura. ‘It happened before we knew him,’ she responded, uncertain, ‘but it was always there. Unless it’s faded or – I don’t know, do scars like that fade?’ This time, she appealed to the Inspector, who was staring at her.

‘Can I have a few words – my car?’ he said at last.

Anna and Laviolette left the room, making their way up the hallway followed slowly by Laura – who made no attempt to speak to Anna.

They stood outside, the rain that had started since Anna’s arrival banging on the porch roof.

Laura remained in the doorway, dry and distant, watching as the Inspector and her childhood friend headed out into the night.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Anna shouted back, through the rain. It sounded like a promise, she thought.

‘Wait!’

Anna and the Inspector turned round.

Martha Deane had appeared suddenly in the doorway. She pushed past Laura, running barefoot through the rain towards them.

‘Martha!’ Laura yelled, but she didn’t follow her daughter out into the rain.

The next moment Martha slammed into Anna, who almost lost her balance.

She braced herself thinking Martha might start hitting her, but then she felt the girl’s narrow arms tighten round her waist, and understood.

She hugged her back – for no reason – just as hard. Martha’s thin pyjamas were already soaked through at the shoulders, as was her hair, pressed into Anna’s red sweater. The girl’s earlier hostility had been replaced by a sudden clinging need.

‘You were right – about dad’s scar. I know the one you’re talking about. She was right,’ she said, excited, to Laviolette, before turning to Anna again. ‘You’ll come back, won’t you? You’ll come back tomorrow?’

Anna smiled down through the rain at her, although Martha was only a head shorter – aware that the Inspector hadn’t moved.

‘Martha!’ Laura yelled again from the front door.

Martha turned and ran back towards the house on tiptoe, her shoulders hunched. She stood in the doorway for a moment, next to Laura, but not touching her, until Laura pulled her back in order to shut the door.

A few seconds later, Anna saw Martha’s face at one of the front windows, framed by curtain. Then the face vanished and the curtains fell back into place.

She hesitated for a moment before following the Inspector to an outdated burgundy Vauxhall, the rain loud on the car’s roof.

Chapter 3

The Vauxhall had been taken for a valet service recently – very recently. It smelt of cleaning chemicals and the strawberry tree, hanging from the rear view mirror. When the Inspector turned on the car engine in order to get the heating working, music he must have been listening to earlier – some sort of church music – came on automatically and the strawberry fumes from the air freshener intensified, making Anna nauseous. She wondered, briefly, if the car was even his.

‘That’s not a coat,’ he said with a heavy accent, turning off the music and giving her a sideways glance. ‘Not for up here anyways.’

She looked down at herself. The jumper had got soaked between the Deanes’ house and the Inspector’s car.

‘What brings you this far north?’

Anna turned to stare at him. ‘I was born here,’ she said defensively.

He put the windscreen wipers on and for no particular reason it immediately felt less claustrophobic in the car.

‘Lung cancer,’ she added.

‘Not you,’ he said, genuinely shocked.

‘No – my grandfather. Advanced small cell lung cancer. The specialist refers to it as “metastatic”, which is specialist-speak for cancer that’s behaving aggressively.’ She stopped speaking, aware that she felt tearful. ‘It means there’s no hope.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Laviolette closed his mouth, and looked away. ‘Who’s your grandfather?’ he asked after a while.

Anna had forgotten that these were the kind of questions people asked up here – questions that sought connections because everybody belonged to somebody. It was difficult to stand alone.

‘Erwin – Erwin Faust.’

Laviolette nodded slowly to himself. ‘The German.’

‘That’s him,’ Anna said, unsurprised. ‘I’m on compassionate leave.’

‘How long for?’

‘A month.’

‘A month?’ he said, surprised. ‘Unpaid.’

‘Where are you on leave from?’

She hesitated. ‘The Met.’

Now he was staring at her again. ‘Rank?’

‘Detective Sergeant.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything earlier?’

‘It didn’t seem necessary. I came here tonight as a friend of the family and because I saw Bryan in the sea this afternoon, which could well be a last sighting.’

‘A friend of the family – and yet you haven’t seen Laura Deane or Bryan Deane for that matter, in over sixteen years.’

They paused, staring through the windscreen at the curve of houses, which looked strangely desolate in the rain – as though they’d been suddenly vacated for some catastrophic reason.

‘Was it sudden – your grandfather?’

‘Very.’

Anna wondered if Laura could hear the car engine from inside number two, and if she could, would she want to know what they were doing out here still, parked at the end of her drive? As soon as she had this thought, she realised that the Inspector was doing it on purpose. She didn’t know how she knew this; she just did.

‘D’you want to tell me what you told DS Chambers?’

‘You want me to go over my statement again?’

‘If you don’t mind.’

She didn’t answer immediately then when she did, she said, ‘DS Chambers didn’t like me very much.’

‘DS Chambers doesn’t like anybody very much at the moment. He’s got a newborn baby and he’s sleeping on average two hours out of every twenty-four. I think he’s got postnatal depression.’

‘He liked Laura Deane.’ When the Inspector didn’t comment on this, she added, ‘But you didn’t, did you?’

He smiled. ‘You’re happy for me to correlate what you’re about to say with CCTV footage?’

‘Of course,’ she said, without hesitation. ‘I saw Bryan Deane this afternoon. I was surfing on Tynemouth Longsands.’

‘Were the waves good?’

‘I only go out when they’re good.’

He nodded and carried on staring through the wind screen.

‘We saw each other on the beach first – I was just about to go in.’

‘So you had your surfboard – he had his kayak – who saw who first? Who was at the water’s edge first?’

She thought about this, and the obtuseness of the question. ‘Me – I guess.’ She saw herself toeing the line, the water freezing cold, staring out to sea, waiting. Then Bryan had appeared suddenly to her left. He must have come up behind her, but she didn’t want to tell the Inspector this.

‘So – he saw you on the beach – came up to you. Did he say anything?’

No – he hadn’t. He’d stood beside her, not saying anything. ‘We chatted about the weather, sea conditions and stuff – like I said,’ she finished flatly, repeating what she’d said earlier – in front of Laura and Martha – to DS Chambers.

After a while, sounding almost regretful, Inspector Laviolette said, ‘It was a beautiful day today.’

‘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.

The air cleared after that and Mary had been happy to take Anna through the small pharmacy lined up under the key rack – a gift from a school trip to Scarborough – on the kitchen bench beside the microwave: the slow-release morphine tablets, anti-inflammatory tablets, anti-sickness tablets and laxatives.

All the labels on the pots had been turned to face outwards. Mary was almost proud of them, and was waiting for some comment from Anna, who tried to think of something to say but couldn’t.

Instead she got up to pour herself a glass of water at the sink, and saw through the nets at the window that it was the garden where the cancer had taken its toll. The house was as still and immaculate as always, but the garden . . . Erwin’s shed was the only thing to rise out of the debris with any semblance of its former self. The plot that had fed the Fausts, their freezer, and many neighbours was laid to waste. The shed looked embarrassed – as though it was just about holding onto its dignity with the help of the crocheted curtain, white still at the tiny window.

Looking out at the garden, Anna finally felt afraid; afraid of what was happening here at number nineteen Parkview, and afraid of what was going to happen. Erwin and Mary had been there all her life; they brought her up when her mother disappeared off the face of the earth – grandparents who became parents again. She wasn’t losing a grandfather; she was losing a father.

Erwin had an appointment at the hospital the next day, and although they let Anna drive them because she was there, she knew they’d have preferred to go on the bus like they usually did.

They weren’t doing any tests – it was just a consultation to see how things were going to be at the end, as Mary put it, re-arranging the brooch in her scarf.

Anna was left outside in a waiting area, on a blue chair next to a water dispenser and wire rack full of cancer care leaflets.

Erwin and Mary had gone into Dr Nadafi’s room – Mary had long since got over her agitation at being assigned a ‘coloured’ man – and sat down in front of his desk. Before the door shut, Anna saw them taking hold of each other’s hands beneath the desk, and her heart broke suddenly for them.

The waiting room, which had been empty, soon filled with young couples, children, a teenage girl and her parents.

Unnerved, Anna stood up to get herself some water from the dispenser, her hands shaking, aware that people were staring. She felt them wondering about her, briefly, then went to wait in the corridor – standing against an old radiator whose heat she could feel through her jeans.

‘You didn’t have to hang about,’ Mary said when they came out, verging on angry.

‘For C-christ’s sake, Nan!’ Anna was angry herself now. ‘We could have got the bus home,’ Mary persisted. ‘I want to be here. Just let me be here.’

Erwin, looking stunned still from the consultation, said nothing.

‘I need the toilet.’ Mary set off down the corridor. ‘Where’s she going?’ Erwin asked Anna, in a panic at the sight of Mary’s retreating back.

‘Just the toilet.’

Erwin nodded as Mary called back over her shoulder, ‘Take him down to Out-Patients – we’ve got a prescription to pick up from the pharmacy.’

Anna started walking towards the stairs when Erwin grabbed hold of her suddenly and pulled her back, staring intently at her and chewing rapidly on the inside of his cheek.

It felt like the first time he’d even noticed her since she’d arrived the day before.

‘Whatever she says – I want you to be here, you know, at the end.’

She cut him off. ‘Granddad.’

‘Please,’ he insisted, keeping a tight grip on her arm, his breath rasping. ‘I mean it.’

He hadn’t really spoken to her until now, and, listening to him, she was aware of his accent – how German he sounded.

‘Not for me,’ he added. ‘For Mary. You have to be there for her because I’ll be leaving her alone.’

Anna put her hand over his, which was still gripping her upper arm. ‘You know I will. You know that.’

‘Hearing’s the last thing to go,’ he started to mumble, more to himself than her, ‘isn’t that strange? You’ve got to carry on talking to me even when I lose consciousness, even when you think that might be it. You’ve got to keep on talking because I’ll still be able to hear you.’

‘I will.’

He nodded and they carried on walking down the stairs, following the blue signs to Out-Patients.

Mary stood by the bedroom window at number nineteen Parkview, looking out for the nurse the hospital was sending them. Her poise of earlier weeks was shattered after having spent an entire night lying next to someone she was convinced was dying. When Anna, angry, asked her why she hadn’t phoned earlier, all she could think to say was, ‘What was the point?’ – unsure even what she’d meant by that.

‘Where’s the nurse?’ Mary said irritably.

Anna, sitting in a G-Plan chair that was as old as the house and still upholstered in its original Everglade green, shut her eyes. She held on tight to Erwin’s hand. His face was turned towards her, his mouth open – rasping. As soon as she so much as started to loosen her grip, his hand slid away from her down the side of the bed, and that scared her. The furniture in the room, like the carpet she remembered from childhood with its dense pattern of ferns, was still in good condition so had never been replaced. Neither Erwin nor Mary would have dreamed of growing tired of these things before they became threadbare.

Everything in the house had been earned and that’s why the television set was covered with a blanket to protect it from dust when it wasn’t being used; why the stereo was kept in the box it came in unless it was being played. Even now, the house was as clean and tidy as it had always been because for Mary and Erwin’s generation cleanliness and tidiness were the only things separating them from the lost and the damned: the drinkers, the fornicators, the unemployed and the hungry.

‘How was Laura last night?’ Mary asked after a while.

Anna hadn’t been expecting this. ‘In shock.’

‘It’s funny – you can’t have seen her in, what – fifteen years or something?’

‘Sixteen.’

Mary turned away from the window to look at her, pausing. ‘And yet, you and Laura, when you were growing up, you were like this,’ she said, twisting her fingers together in spite of the arthritis. ‘You were close to Bryan as well – at one time. He used to wait for you coming home from school – off the Newcastle bus, d’you remember?’

Anna did. She could see him now – waiting on the flower troughs outside the station, next to the Italian café, Moscadini’s. They’d walk back from the station down to Hartford Estate together, sometimes talking, sometimes not – Bryan in something barely resembling a uniform and Anna in her navy blue and red Grammar School colours, the beribboned hat pushed in her bag. She’d been glad of the company – and the protection – because it was a risky and unpleasant business getting home to Parkview in a Grammar School uniform.

‘He was forever in our back garden, drawing some miniscule insect with his magnifying glass.’

Anna stared at Mary. She’d forgotten that Bryan drew, and she’d forgotten all about his magnifying glass as well, which had a resonance for her she fought to remember, but couldn’t right then.

‘Have you got any of his pictures still?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Probably. Somewhere. I’m sure I put some up in the wash house. That poor child,’ she added, lost in thought and barely aware now of Erwin’s rhythmic rasping. ‘He was as good as orphaned – the Strike on one side and suicide on the other. It was Bryan who found her, you know.’

‘Found who?’

‘His mother – Rachel. What a thing to come home from school to. You won’t remember –’

But Anna did remember. She remembered because it had been a Monday – wash day – and Bryan had come running through all Mary’s sheets, hanging from the line she had propped cloud high, and Mary had yelled at him until she’d seen his face, and the dark patch on his trousers where he’d wet himself.

Mary took him inside number nineteen and ran a bath – and that was the first time Anna saw Bryan Deane naked; at the age of twelve, the day his mother died.

‘It was hard on Bryan – he was Rachel’s favourite. They said all sorts of things about Bobby Deane after that, but I don’t think Bobby ever laid so much as a finger on Rachel, she was just lonely that’s all – you know, that real loneliness; the sort you can’t escape from. Bobby was a Union Official – he was working twelve hours a day and more. They said all sorts about Rachel as well,’ Mary carried on, ‘about how Bryan wasn’t even Bobby’s because there was a darkness to him that none of the other Deanes had.’ She sighed.

‘Bryan?’

Mary nodded. ‘During the Strike, Rachel took to spending a lot of time with somebody Bobby sang with on the colliery choir. She liked to sing as well. I think it was just companionship, but it wasn’t something you did back then. Men and women weren’t friends. You stayed in your own home . . . your own backyard. You didn’t take to wandering, however innocent that wandering might be. There were rules – and Rachel was never very good at rules; she used to say she felt suffocated.’

‘So who was Rachel’s friend?’

Mary hesitated. ‘A widower, but a widower still counted as another woman’s husband if you were married yourself, and Rachel was. He was a safety engineer at Bates.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died in an accident. You’ve got no colour,’ she said suddenly to Anna.

‘I’m not sleeping well.’

‘I can tell. That’s what make up’s for, you know – the bad days.’ Her eyes moved, disgruntled, over Anna’s running clothes – noting them for the first time – before she turned to look out the window again.

An optimistically red Nissan was busy parking on the street below, and a woman was getting out and glancing up at the house.

‘That hair.’

‘What about my hair?’ Anna patted her head.

‘Not yours.’

‘Whose hair, Nan?’

Short term memory loss and lack of concentration were meant to be side effects of the morphine they were giving Erwin, but if anything it was Mary who was suffering these symptoms on his behalf. The thought that Mary might be siphoning off some of Erwin’s morphine crossed Anna’s mind – and not for the first time either.

‘Laura could have had anyone with that hair, and yet she chose Bryan Deane.’

‘Or he chose her.’

‘Maybe, but if you’d asked me all them years ago who was most likely to end up with Bryan Deane, I’d have said you were. Don’t look at me like that. I used to see you together. You didn’t grow up alone. I was there as well, remember?’

She glanced at Erwin, whose head had rolled back onto the pillow, exhausted, his mouth open and the breath rattling through it still.

‘He stopped breathing last night, and I was so angry with him,’ she said, becoming increasingly distressed. ‘I was angry with him for making me that afraid. I’m angry with him for dying, Anna. I’m just – angry. I feel angry the whole time. Love hangs on strange threads,’ Mary concluded, making an effort to control the tears.

Anna left Erwin – and Mary – with the nurse, Susan, who was in her late forties and who entered the Fausts’ lives with fortitude, humour, the re-issued eau de toilette of Poison, and a portable oxygen canister.

Within minutes of her stepping inside number nineteen Parkview, normality had been restored and the terrors of the night vanquished. By the time Anna left, Erwin was breathing normally and Susan was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the kitchenette with Mary.

Anna got into her car and paused for a minute – pressing her forehead hard into the steering wheel before turning on the engine and driving out of the estate past the parade of shops where Mo’s used to be. Curious about the shop that had featured so prominently throughout her childhood, she parked the car.

There were only two shops still open on the Parade – a fish and chip shop called The Seven Seas, and the convenience store that used to be Mo’s – although this wasn’t immediately apparent given the caging across the windows on the outside of both.

There was no longer a post office inside Mo’s, but the security glass had been retained – behind which there was a till, an overweight girl in a tracksuit, a child, and most of the shop’s alcoholic stock.

‘Milk and eggs?’ Anna asked, not particularly hopeful.

‘Back of the shop – in the fridge.’

She felt the girl’s eyes on her as she made her way towards the back of the shop, which smelt of underlying damp and rotten lino.

Anna recognised the lino – it had been there in Mo’s time when there had been a baker’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, hardware store, chemist and hairdresser’s owned by Mo’s twin sister on the Parade. It was where all the women on the estate used to go to get their hair done, including Anna when she was small. She hated getting her hair cut so much that Mary used to have to bring one of Erwin’s belts with her to the salon so that they could tie her into the chair in order to keep her still.

She and Laura used to spend most of their summers walking between Mo’s shop, the park and home. Anna could even remember the way Mo’s used to smell – of sherbet, newsprint and hairspray from the salon next door. There had been a pink and green rocket outside whose presence it was difficult to justify given that nobody she knew ever had ten pence to spend on a rocket ride – the pennies they pooled together went on sweet things.

They would walk sluggishly, tipping back sherbet, towards the park the houses on Parkview overlooked to the rear. A park that had been in perpetual decline, and whose play equipment – erected on concrete in the hedonistic days before health and safety – was painted metal that got chipped and rusted, a fall off which resulted in broken teeth, fractured elbows, hairline cracks to the skull and tetanus jabs.

Anna would sit behind Laura on the metal horse as the sun moved across the sky, not speaking, surrounded by roses that never seemed to bloom, the horse’s rusting saddle dying their thighs a feint red – until the big boys crawled up out of the sewage outlet where they kept their stash of pornography and sniffed glue. When the big boys appeared it was time to go home, but if they were out of glue, and walked in a straight line still with eyes that weren’t red, they let Laura and Anna play chicken with them on the railway line that ran between the Alcan aluminium smelting plant to the north, and Cambois power station to the south – the power station whose four chimneys would have filled the horizon through her apartment windows at the Ridley Arms if they hadn’t been demolished in 2003.

Until the summer Jamie Deane, Bryan’s older brother, put his hand up Laura’s skirt and Anna and Laura stopped going to the play park.

The memory took Anna by surprise, and for a moment she forgot what she was doing and stood staring into the fridge at the back of the shop. She’d forgotten all about Jamie Deane.

‘You alright?’ the girl shouted out.

Anna jerked in reaction to this, getting the milk and eggs out of the fridge and walking back towards the glass booth at the front. Distracted, she pushed the money across the counter, took her change and was about to leave when she said, ‘You’re not by any chance related to Mo are you?’

‘Daughter.’ It was said without hesitation, and without interest – as if nothing she ever heard or said would change her fate; this included.

‘Say hi to her for me, will you? Hi from Anna – the German’s granddaughter.’

‘She’s dead,’ the girl said, without expression.

Anna quickly left the shop with an acute sense of depression – not only at the demise of Mo’s empire, but at her lineage as well. Mo herself had been a large, bright, singing woman with a sense of humour that could cut you in two.

The same couldn’t be said of her daughter.

She was about to get into her car when something caught her eye – a burgundy Vauxhall, parked outside one of the bungalows arranged in a semi-circle round the green that the Parade backed onto. Retirement bungalows – most of them in pretty good repair still, the gardens well tended.

While outdated burgundy Vauxhalls weren’t exactly unique – especially not here on the Hartford Estate – Anna was certain that the one parked in front of the bungalows opposite was the one she’d been in the night before; the one belonging to Inspector Laviolette.

She got into her car and phoned Mary.

‘You’re not back at the flat already?’

‘No – I stopped at Mo’s.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Milk. And eggs. Nan, you know the bungalows behind Mo’s?’

‘Armstrong Crescent?’

‘I don’t know. Nice gardens –’

‘Armstrong Crescent,’ Mary said again.

‘Do you know anybody who lives there?’

Mary hesitated. ‘It’s where they re-housed Bobby Deane. After he started drinking.’ She hesitated again, as if about to add something to this, but in the end changed her mind.

Chapter 5

Bobby Deane, whose face had been all over the Strike of 1984 – 85, was sitting in one of the few pieces of furniture in the bungalow’s lounge – an armchair that smelt of urine. The entire bungalow, in fact, smelt of urine, but it was strongest in the immediate vicinity of the armchair, which led Inspector Laviolette to the assumption that the armchair was the source, and if not the armchair then the man sat in it. Either way, the Inspector wasn’t visibly bothered.

Bobby Deane watched Laviolette with moist, alert eyes, brightly sunk into a swollen, purple face. He had no idea who Laviolette was, and couldn’t remember whether or not he’d spoken yet or how long he’d been in the house for – he only knew he was police. Bobby had no recollection of Laviolette’s arrival either – he could have been there for years – and not knowing what else to do, simply stared at the man in the green coat making his way slowly round the room, sometimes smiling to himself sometimes not.

Laviolette was smiling as he sat down on the microwave against the wall opposite Bobby Deane’s armchair – the only other available seating in the room – that no longer worked, but was still plugged in. ‘Off out somewhere, Mr Deane?’

The tone was pleasant, but Bobby knew what police ‘pleasant’ meant.

He stared blankly at Laviolette then down at himself. He was wearing a padded blue Texaco jacket, shiny with neglect. His eyes ran over his legs then down to the floor where they picked out something purplish among the carpet’s pile – his feet. Those were his feet down there, bare and without shoes.

He became aware of Laviolette’s eyes on his feet as well. ‘Sorry to interrupt – this won’t take more than a couple of minutes.’

Where had he been going?

‘Have you seen Bryan at all recently, Mr Deane?’

‘Bryan,’ Bobby echoed, thinking about this.

‘Your son, Bryan?’

Bobby looked down again at the anorak he was wearing, and remembered – briefly. He’d put the anorak on because of Bryan, but when was that? It could have been years ago – he hadn’t seen Bryan in years. All he remembered was sitting in the chair when he’d heard a car pull up outside. He’d gone to the window, lifted the yellow net and seen Bryan. He’d gone out into the hallway, slipping over something and bruising his left knee badly – he remembered the pain and the way he’d shouted out, ‘Just coming!’ as though Bryan was already in the house, speaking to him. Then he’d put the anorak on, and was about to open the front door when he’d looked down and realised that he didn’t have any shoes or socks on.

So he’d gone into the bedroom to look for some socks – checking out the window to see that Bryan was still there.

The sun had been bright – he had a vague memory of brightness – and the bedroom windows even more filthy than the ones in the lounge, but he’d been able to see Bryan’s big silver car parked on the road still and made out Bryan inside it. Only Bryan’s posture was odd – his arms holding the steering wheel and his head resting on it – and Bobby had known instinctively then that Bryan was trying to decide whether to ring on the door or not.

Then Bobby had sat down on the mattress in the bedroom and fallen into one of the black holes he was more often in than out of these days, and forgotten what it was he was doing. He’d forgotten all about Bryan outside as well. At some point he’d got up again and gone to the window, without knowing why. His subconscious had taken him to the window to check and see whether Bryan was still parked there. Consciously, however, he had no idea what he was doing standing at the window or what it was he was looking out for because there was nothing out there as far as he could see – apart from a large girl in a pink tracksuit, smoking a cigarette on the green just behind the shops, staring at his house. When was that? Only yesterday? Had he been barefoot in his anorak since yesterday?

But Bobby didn’t mention any of this, partly out of habit – because the man sitting opposite was police and it was his policy not to answer any questions put to him by police – and partly because he was already in the process of forgetting.

‘What’s that? Did you just say something?’

‘Have you seen Bryan recently?’ Laviolette asked again, aware that Bobby Deane’s vulnerability was making him uncomfortable.

‘Bryan’s my youngest son,’ Bobby said slowly, uncertain.

‘That’s right,’ Laviolette agreed. ‘Have you seen him lately?’

‘He’s got a little girl of his own,’ Bobby carried on, ignoring the question. ‘What’s her name?’ he appealed, half-heartedly to the Inspector.

Laviolette smiled patiently. ‘Martha.’

This time, the smile seemed to relax Bobby. ‘Martha. He brought her here once. It was a Saturday – he takes her to the stables at Keenley’s, Saturdays.’ There was spittle on his chin; the recollection was making him reckless – despite the fact that his audience was police – because he might lose it at any moment. There couldn’t be anything wrong in this recollection – surely grandchildren were allowed to go horse riding if they chose, and sons were allowed to visit their fathers without breaking any laws.

‘Did Bryan come yesterday?’

‘I haven’t seen Bryan in years. What was yesterday?’

‘Saturday,’ Laviolette responded, debating whether to be more specific or not. ‘Easter Saturday,’ he said after a while.

‘It’s Easter?’ At first Bobby looked surprised – then resigned.

‘Yesterday was Saturday. Did you see Bryan yesterday, Mr Deane?’

Bobby shook his head, running his left hand down the greasy chair arm and starting to pick at the foam. ‘No. He never came in.’

‘He never came in,’ Laviolette repeated gently. ‘So he was – where? – outside?’

‘I don’t remember,’ Bobby said, suddenly deflated. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘Mr Deane, your son’s wife reported him missing yesterday – Easter Saturday – and we’re trying to find him, that’s all. We’d like to find Bryan so that he can go home.’

‘You don’t know where Bryan is?’

The Inspector got up, sighing. ‘Well, if you do see Bryan – if you even think you see Bryan, will you give me a call?’

He gave Bobby Deane his card, waiting for him to read it.

Bobby sat turning it over between his thumb and forefinger.

‘Is it alright if I use your bathroom?’ Laviolette asked.

As he disappeared out of the lounge and Bobby Deane’s mind, Bobby sat clutching the air with his left hand. He was holding a piece of leather in his hands – reins, attached to a harness, attached to a pony he was pulling towards the sand dunes rising in front of him.

The pony, so sure of itself underground, was hesitant up here on top – it kept stumbling and stopping even though it was blinkered, bewildered. Bobby would have to pull hard then to get her to move, and yell irritably – until he remembered that the black and white pit pony was the reason for his own day up top as well, and then he’d give her neck a belligerent stroke. All the same, he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t gone running off – this was her one day a year up top. But then one day probably didn’t make the other three hundred and sixty-four any better, he reasoned – in fact it probably made them worse. This reasoning didn’t lessen his own disappointment, however. He’d so wanted to see the pony run. In the end, frustrated, he’d tethered it to a hawthorn and run up onto the dunes with the rest of the boys. He must have been – how old? – as old as Bryan’s daughter the last time he saw her. So he ran with the others up onto the dunes, cutting his feet, which were bare, in the thick blades of dune grass.

He sat moving his bare feet now, in the carpet’s filthy pile, while the Inspector checked the cabinet in the bathroom for signs of occupancy other than Bobby Deane’s. There was nothing apart from a bottle of Old Spice, a cup of tea, a couple of buttons, and a penny whose copper had turned blue. There was a fraying yellow towel hanging from a nail in the wall, no sign of any toilet paper – and a bath full of water.

Laviolette let the bath out then crossed the hallway into the kitchen where there was a piece of board over the hob on the oven and a Calor Gaz camping stove on top of this. On the surface, lined up, were cartons of weed killer, a box of disposable gloves, and various tools. Somebody was using Bobby Deane’s kitchen to cut Methadrone, and it smelt bad in here.

In the lounge, Bobby Deane age twelve had been running with the other boys down the dunes onto the beach. Now he’d taken the edge off his excitement, he thought he should go and check on his pony so he climbed back up and slid down the other side into the field and there, standing by the hawthorn bush and pit pony, was a girl. She must have been collecting some sort of berries because her mouth, her hands and her dress were stained almost black with them, and she was holding a flower in one of her hands. A carnation? Bobby stopped half way down the dunes, watching her stroke the pony.

When Laviolette went back into the lounge, Bobby was staring at the wall opposite where the bungalow’s previous owner had left a barometer hanging – the needle was pointing to ‘Fair’. He was smiling while clenching and unclenching his feet in the carpet.

‘I’m going now, Mr Deane,’ the Inspector called out.

Bobby stared at him in shock. Who was he? How long had he been standing there for, and what was he doing in his house?

‘I’ll ask Rachel later when she gets in from work,’ he heard himself saying, automatically. ‘Her shift finishes soon. I’ll ask her – she’ll know about Bryan.’

Laviolette left Bobby Deane’s bungalow and stood in the front garden for a moment, thinking about Rachel Deane – who he remembered as a long, silent woman – and Rachel Deane’s suicide. Then he crossed the immaculate garden belonging to the bungalow next door. There was a stone donkey on the porch, pulling a stone cart planted with purple pansies; the purple jarring with the yellow the front door was painted. He knocked and a tidy, sour-looking woman answered – promptly enough to suggest that she’d been watching his approach from behind the nets.

He showed his ID, introduced himself and explained that he’d been next door at Mr Deane’s – aware that the woman already knew all this. Only the left hand side of her face and body were visible behind the door as her eyes, worried, searched the street behind Laviolette, torn between desperately wanting to know what the police were doing next door, and not wanting anybody to see the police on her own front step.

‘I’d ask you in, but I’ve just done the floors,’ the woman said, staring at the Inspector’s feet, which weren’t clean.

‘That’s fine, Mrs –’

The woman hesitated then said, thinly, ‘Harris.’

‘Mrs Harris.’ Laviolette smiled. ‘Mr Deane’s son, Bryan, sometimes visits him Saturdays. I was wondering whether you happened to notice whether Bryan Deane visited Mr Deane yesterday?’

‘What’s all this about?’

‘Just follow up to something – a family matter.’

‘A family matter involving the police?’ She waited, but the Inspector had nothing more to add to this, he just stood there smiling at her.

‘Did you see Bryan Deane here yesterday, Mrs Harris?’

‘He was here.’

‘What time?’

‘Around eleven.’ She sighed. ‘I noticed because it was the first time in ages I’d seen his car parked outside – and he was parked in my husband’s spot. My husband’s registered disabled – that’s why we’ve got the bay outside. I was about to go out there and ask him to move – when he drove off.’

‘So he didn’t go into the house?’

She shook her head. ‘He was parked there for, I don’t know – ten minutes or something – then he just drove off, like I said.’

‘He didn’t get out of the car at all?’

She shook her head again. ‘No. And like I said, it’s the first time he’s been round here in months – maybe even longer. Not like the other one.’

‘The other one?’ Laviolette said sharply.

‘There’s another one – tattoos – he’s been round a lot the past six months, and when he’s round, the shouting that goes on . . . it comes through the walls. I mean, we have the television up loud anyway because of Derek’s hearing aid, but when that lad’s round we can hear everything, and the language . . . in our own home. We’ve been on and on to the council, but they’re not doing anything about it.’ She paused, waiting for an echo of sympathy from the Inspector, but it never came.

The Inspector wasn’t following this. He was thinking hard about Jamie Deane. Mrs Harris had to be talking about Jamie Deane, who’d been in prison for twenty years – and who was released six months ago. The Methadrone production line in Bobby Deane’s kitchen had Jamie Deane all over it.

‘. . . and nobody deserves neighbours like that,’ Mrs Harris concluded.

Laviolette stared at her for a moment, his mind still elsewhere. ‘When you hear shouting through the wall – coming from next door – does it never occur to either you or your husband to knock and see if Mr Deane’s okay?’

Mrs Harris looked bewildered.

‘That would certainly be the neighbourly thing to do, don’t you think? It might save on your phone bill as well – to the council.’

‘Are you saying . . .’ she began.

But Laviolette cut her off. ‘What I’m saying, Mrs Harris, is this – has it ever occurred to you while you’ve been on the phone to the council to drop in the fact that you’ve got an elderly man living alone next door to you – with Alzheimer’s?’

Mrs Harris was too shocked by the Inspector’s anger to respond. All she could do was lay her hand against her collarbone and throat and watch him retreat across the immaculate garden, her eyes wide.

‘I’m a good Christian,’ she shouted hoarsely after him, afraid, when he stopped at the gate and turned.

‘Does Mr Deane get any other visitors?’

‘There’s a woman up on Parkview who brings in shopping for him – Mary Faust – but that’s only once a week,’ she said quickly, her eyes wet. ‘I’m a good Christian,’ she repeated, not wanting the Inspector to walk away with the wrong opinion of her, before shutting her yellow door on the world.

Mo’s daughter, Leanne, could have told the Inspector exactly when Jamie Deane visited his father in the bungalow on Armstrong Crescent because Jamie Deane’s irregular appearances in the store over the past six months were the only thing that made life inside the glass security booth worth living for her. She knew everything there was to know about him – even things he didn’t know about himself, like the way his eyes creased at the corner and got brighter when he laughed. Leanne knew everything.

Today though, Jamie caught her off guard.

She was busy reading a filthy text a friend had just sent her about Daniel Craig while talking to her daughter, Kayleigh, who was in the booth with her because it was Sunday, and who wanted to know what a zombie was – when she looked up and saw Jamie standing smiling through the security glass at her. The locket she’d been sucking on dropped out her mouth and fell wetly against her skin. That’s exactly who Jamie Deane reminded her of, she thought – Daniel Craig.

‘Haven’t seen you in a while,’ Leanne said, pulling her tracksuit top down nervously over her waist, breathing in and sliding off the chair.

‘Missed me?’

She pulled her hair back over her shoulders and laughed.

‘Put a pack of Bensons on the tab for me, will you.’

‘Your tab’s getting long.’

‘I’ll make it up to you.’

She was shaking as she got the cigarettes off the shelf and slid them through to his side, and thought she might cry when he stroked the back of her hand – briefly – with his forefinger.

Close to clinically obese, there was so much going on between chin and counter that all Jamie could do was stare vaguely but appreciatively at Leanne’s midway bulk – em blazoned with the word SWALLOWS spelt out in sequins (a gift from the friend who sent the Daniel Craig text) – before heading out of the shop and back into his van.

Two minutes later, he was back.

‘You can’t of smoked the whole pack.’

Jamie, distracted, said, ‘There’s a car parked outside dad’s – know anything about it?’

‘What car?’

Abandoning Kayleigh and leaving the booth door propped open with a fire extinguisher, Leanne followed Jamie out of the shop, but didn’t recognise the car parked outside Bobby Deane’s bungalow.

‘It might not be for your dad,’ she said at last, pleased with herself for thinking this.

Jamie grunted in concession to this theory as her eyes slid over the chain caught in the crease at the back of his neck and she breathed in the smell of him – take away food, dog, dope, anger, and a sweetness that vanished as soon as she tried to define it, and that wasn’t aftershave or the backlash of the dope.

‘Any strangers been in the shop this morning?’

‘No. Wait –’

‘Who?’ he demanded, irritable. ‘A woman who knew mum.’

‘Police,’ he hissed, turning round suddenly and nearly knocking her backwards she’d crept so close.

She lifted her eyes with difficulty from his neck and watched Inspector Laviolette leave Bobby Deane’s bungalow then ring on Mrs Harris’s door.

‘What the fuck’s he doing now?’ Jamie mumbled running, crouching into his van, which had Reeves Regeneration painted on the side.

He watched through the windscreen as Laviolette stood talking to Mrs Harris then Mrs Harris’s front door shut and the Inspector got back in his car.

Soon after this the burgundy Vauxhall accelerated past Jamie Deane’s parked van and Mo’s daughter, Leanne, standing with her arms folded on the pavement outside the shop. Behind her, Kayleigh was pressing a tongue dyed red with lolly against the glass.

Jamie wound the van’s window down. ‘Has he gone?’

‘Yeah – he’s gone.’

‘Get me a pasty.’

Leanne turned and walked automatically back into the shop, taking a pasty past its sell by date from the cold cabinet.

Jamie took it from her then put the van into gear without another word, without so much as even looking at her.

She stood on the pavement and watched him turn into Armstrong Crescent, her heart breaking.

*

‘What was he doing here?’ Jamie yelled at Bobby, his mouth full of pasty, staring at the Inspector’s card. He’d already been in the kitchen, and the stuff in there was untouched. ‘I can’t believe you let that bastard in here. Him!’ he cried out, in frustration.

He knew that losing patience didn’t work, but he hadn’t yet discovered what did so in the meantime he carried on yelling at Bobby Deane who’d just had time – following the Inspector’s departure – to walk into the hallway in search of a staircase that didn’t exist in order to go upstairs to a bedroom that also no longer existed.

Perplexed at being unable to find any stairs at all, Bobby had gone back into the lounge and sat down in the armchair again when he heard the front door opening. The next minute a man walked into the room who he briefly recognised as one of his sons – he just couldn’t remember which, and had no idea what his name was.

Then his son started yelling at him and then he stamped on his left foot, which was bare still, and the pain was such a shock to Bobby it blocked out the yelling for a while.

He became confused and as a result of this confusion, Jamie and the bungalow slipped entirely from his mind as he fell into a profound sense of unfamiliarity, which made him panic and want to leave the chair he was sitting in and go in search of the stairs again. If he could only find the stairs, he’d be able to find Rachel.

Rachel was upstairs waiting for him; she had something to give him – a flower – and the flower was beginning to wilt; it needed water.

He tried to get up, but was pushed back down.

After that, he kept his eyes on the man pacing in front of him.

There was a dense pain in his left foot that made him feel helpless – then he remembered, momentarily. ‘I told him Rachel would be back soon – that she’d know where Bryan was.’

Jamie stared at his father. ‘Bryan? It was nothing to do with me then?’

‘Who are you?’ Bobby said, managing to get to his feet at last, in spite of the pain, and shuffling to the window.

‘I’m your son, you stupid fuck – your son, Jamie.’ He let out a few brief, frustrated sobs. ‘And I did twenty years for you. Twenty years – and you’ve got no idea who the fuck I am.’ He put his hand over his face.

Bobby, who was looking out the window, said, ‘He’s gone.’

‘Who’s gone you daft fucker?’

‘Our Bryan was parked outside. I thought maybe he’d come to take me for a drive up the coast – I haven’t seen the sea in a while – but he never came in. Why didn’t he come in?’ Bobby appealed briefly to Jamie, who was now smoking one of the Bensons he’d taken from the shop. ‘Can I have one?’

‘No,’ Jamie yelled. Then, ‘I don’t fucking believe this. Twenty years and it’s still Bryan. Bryan.’

Bobby looked down at the windowsill where there was a spider’s web flecked with flies. ‘Are you looking for Bryan too?’

‘Why would I be looking for Bryan?’

‘He’s gone missing.’

‘Bryan?’

‘Bryan. The police are looking for him.’

Bobby turned back to the window, distracted by a woman next door who looked vaguely familiar, wheeling her bin out onto the pavement. The bin had the number eight painted on it, in white. Bobby wondered about the number and the woman, who was staring at him and who looked like she had a freshly pruned rose bush up her arse.

Laughing quietly to himself, he waved, but she didn’t wave back.

In fact, she almost ran back up the garden to her front door.

Still laughing, Bobby mumbled, ‘That’s it – piss off back to where you came from.’ Then, turning away from the window and seeing a man standing in the room behind him, smoking – who he was sure hadn’t been standing there earlier – he said again, ‘Can I have one?’

‘Give over.’ Jamie threw the cigarette into the fireplace’s empty grate.

Bobby followed its course through the air and into the grate, waiting.

When the man left the room, he called out, ‘Where are you going? I’m hungry.’

He followed him out into the hallway, desperately trying to think of a way to make him stay, suddenly terrified at the thought of being left alone. ‘I’m hungry,’ he said again.

Jamie paused at the front door, leaning back against the wall and accidentally turning the light switch on. He seemed preoccupied – bored, even.

Bobby was fiddling with the zip on his Texaco anorak, wondering where the door in front of him led to.

‘You already ate,’ Jamie said. ‘When?’

‘Just now. Can’t you smell it still?’

Looking around him, Bobby gave the air a quick sniff. ‘What did I eat?’

‘Sunday roast – the full works . . . beef . . . yorkshires . . . roast potatoes.’ Jamie belched. ‘Excuse me.’

‘My stomach feels tight.’

‘Cause you stuffed yourself silly, that’s why.’

‘But, I’m still hungry.’ Bobby was starting to panic again now. ‘Is it Sunday?’

Jamie pulled open the front door and Bobby saw the crescent of bungalows curving round the green. In the centre of the green there was a yellow bin, lying on its side. It looked like somebody had tried to set fire to it. Tilting his head slightly, which hurt, he could just make out the words Wansbeck Council.

‘The man who was here,’ he called out, suddenly, ‘he was Laviolette’s boy. That’s who he was,’ Bobby declared, his voice triumphant.

Jamie walked back towards him. ‘I don’t know what you’re sounding so pleased about. I don’t know how you can even bear to say that man’s name.’

‘I used to sing with Laviolette in the colliery choir – the Ashington Male Voice Choir. We went to Germany together with the choir.’

‘And what else, dad? What else did you do? You don’t even remember, do you?’

Jamie slammed him hard against the wall – the crown of his head catching the bottom of the electric meter.

Bobby, slumped against the wall, shook his head.

‘Mum. D’you remember her?’

Bobby fought hard to catch at something flitting round inside his head; he shut his eyes and pushed his hand out to take hold of the flower proffered. ‘Red carnations,’ he gasped. ‘The women were in the pit yard, waiting for us. They gave us flowers – carnations for heroes – to take the hurt out of having to go back after the Strike.’ He shook his head sadly, the clarity and sharpness of the women’s faces he’d summoned, already fading. ‘But there were no heroes by then – everything was broken.’

Jamie shook his head in disbelief. ‘Yeah, everything was broken.’

‘I looked for her,’ Bobby insisted suddenly, ‘among the women with flowers, but she wasn’t there. She’d already gone by then, hadn’t she?’ he appealed softly to Jamie, his eyes wet.

‘Oh, she’d gone a long time before that only you were too busy with the bloody Strike to see.’

‘She was tired – thirty-one pounds a week minus the fifteen the Government took off her saying we got paid by the Union, only we didn’t. What does that make?’ Before Jamie had time to work it out, Bobby said, ‘Sixteen pounds a week. Sixteen pounds a week makes you tired – it would make anyone tired.’

‘How the fuck d’you remember that – sixteen pounds a week – and not remember Roger Laviolette?’

‘Roger Laviolette,’ Bobby echoed happily. ‘I used to sing with –’

‘Yes, you used to sing with him,’ Jamie yelled into his face, holding onto him by his anorak, which smelt terrible up close, ‘and how is it that you remember the singing, but you don’t remember the killing?’

‘I never killed anyone,’ Bobby said, frightened.

‘Yes you did. You killed Roger Laviolette because of mum and him.’

‘Wait – where are you going?’

But Jamie was no longer there.

There was washing hanging across the balconies of the flats above the shops and Bobby stared for a moment at a large bedspread with a picture of a leopard on it, before walking, barefoot, out the front door and down the overgrown garden path to the gate as a white van turned the corner out of Armstrong Crescent.

He was waiting for somebody, he was sure, but he was only sure for a few moments. Then he forgot who it was he thought he was waiting for.

Then he forgot he’d even been waiting, and no longer knew what he was doing standing barefoot at the end of the path, leaning against the gate – so he let himself out and crossed the street onto the green opposite, still curious about the yellow bin.

After contemplating it for a while, he looked about him trying to work out not so much where he was going, but where he’d come from. Neither the bungalows in front of him nor the block of flats behind signified anything much. He only knew that his feet were cold and that the left foot hurt. Looking down, he saw that his feet were bare and that the one on the left was badly bruised.

The front door to one of the bungalows opposite was open and there was a woman staring at him from the windows of the bungalow next door to that.

If he just sat down in the grass and waited, it would probably be okay. What would come to pass would come to pass in a world that was as tired of him as he was of it.

A flock of seagulls flew overhead then circling the upturned bin and its contents, interested. They only came inland when the weather was bad out to sea.

Bobby tilted his head back and looked up at the sky, the fast moving clouds disorientating him further.

Was it today he’d been down to the beach and onto the dunes with the pit ponies?

Was it today he’d seen the small girl in the dress? It couldn’t have been – this was no weather for dresses like that, and the dress had been stained with some kind of fruit, but it couldn’t be blackberries because it was too early in the year for blackberries.

He looked around to check the trees and see whether they had leaves or not, but there were no trees on any of the horizons. There was no colour in the gardens opposite either – the only thing that stuck out was the yellow door in the bungalow where the woman’s face was staring at him still.

Then it started to rain.

He pulled his collar up and carried on sitting there, unsure what else to do or where to go until a woman came walking through the rain. She was wearing a long waterproof coat, and a headscarf – and she had a blue carrier bag in her hand.

It took him a while to realise that she was walking towards him; walking fast, her shoes slipping on the wet grass.

‘Bobby!’ she gasped. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’ She turned round on the spot, taking in the flats and the back of the shops and the bungalows as he’d done earlier, only she was more stunned. ‘How long have you been out here for? Where are your shoes? You’ve got a cut on your head – there’s blood.’

She was on the verge of tears as she pulled him to his feet and led him towards the bungalow with its front door open still.

‘I don’t want to go in there,’ he said, pulling his arms away from her.

‘Get inside out of this rain, Bobby.’ She pushed him forcibly indoors and he stood in the hallway listening to the sounds of water running, and soon there was steam coming out of the room at the end of the hallway.

Chapter 6

The sky was clearing by the time Anna turned back down Quay Road towards the Quayside, and the sun now making its way through the disappearing clouds, was harsh. She was driving straight into it and so didn’t see Martha Deane sitting on the bench opposite the Ridley Arms until she pulled up right beside her.

Martha had her bike with her.

Laviolette had been right – here was Martha paying her a visit and sooner even than he’d probably anticipated.

‘How long have you been here for?’ Anna asked as she got out of the car, squinting because of the light coming off the water.

‘I don’t know,’ Martha mumbled, unsure of her tone. ‘I can’t stand it at home any longer, and . . . you don’t mind?’

Anna sat down on the bench beside her, sighing and tilting her face instinctively towards the April sun.

‘I don’t believe her,’ Martha said suddenly.

‘Don’t believe who?’

‘Mum. I don’t believe her about anything. Do you?’

Ignoring this, Anna said, ‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘I heard dad and Nan talking yesterday morning. Dad said you should have phoned him about a short term let – that he’d have done you a deal.’ She paused. ‘Nan said she told you to phone him.’

‘She probably did. I don’t know – I’ve had so much on my mind.’

This was a lie. She had phoned Tyneside Properties before coming north and asked to speak to Bryan, but found herself unable to – so hung up.

‘Nan says your granddad’s dying.’

‘He is.’

‘That’s sad.’ Martha threw something into the sea. ‘I wanted to go out with them this morning on the search – one of the boats, helicopters, anything . . . I just want to be out there doing something. It doesn’t feel like anybody’s doing anything.’ Her voice was loud – tearful – and the next minute she had her head on Anna’s shoulder and her arms round her neck, pulling herself to her.

Anna put her hand stiffly on Martha’s hair, and tried not to tense up. She could feel Martha’s tears running over her collarbone and beneath her running vest.

When Martha stopped crying, she let her arms drop but kept her head resting on Anna’s shoulder, staring out to sea, and after a while said, ‘I came home late once from a hockey match, and dad’s car was parked on the drive. It wasn’t until I triggered the security light that I saw he was in the car still, just sitting in the car on the drive, in the dark.’ She paused, thinking about whether she wanted to say what she was going to say next. ‘He waved at me and acted like he’d just got home, but I knew he’d been there a long time.’ She twisted her head on Anna’s shoulder, looking up at her. ‘He just looked so unhappy, and you know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking – what if he just couldn’t cope any more with all the rows they’ve been having?’

Anna kept looking at the sea, aware that Martha was watching her. ‘Everybody rows.’

‘There’s not a night in the past year when I haven’t had to go to sleep with my headphones on to try and cut out the sound of them going on and on at each other about money – always money. That’s what everything comes down to.’

Anna had a clear picture of Martha curled up in bed with her headphones on, and it was one of a deep loneliness she recognised from her own childhood; a loneliness she had carried into adulthood with her, as an inability to seek comfort – especially physical comfort.

Martha was picking at a frayed seam in her jeans. ‘Did something happen between dad and you, like – a long time ago?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘You knew – about his appendicitis – and he was so pleased to see you yesterday.’

‘We barely spoke.’

‘He doesn’t get pleased about much these days, but he was pleased about seeing you.’

Anna paused. ‘We grew up together and haven’t seen each other in a while – that’s all.’

‘You, mum and dad used to all live next door to each other. I know from Nan how close you and mum used to be – like sisters, she said, right?’

Anna nodded.

‘So how come mum and dad never – and I mean never – talk about you?’

‘I can’t answer that.’

‘Well, that’s how I know something happened.’

Martha carried on watching her without comment then suddenly said, ‘I brought something for you.’ She searched in her pockets for a while then handed Anna a photograph – of Bryan Deane sitting alone at a table in a restaurant overlooking a blue, white-capped sea. Despite the view, he was staring down at the check tablecloth. He wasn’t smiling; he wasn’t even looking at the camera, and she could barely make out his face.

‘That’s Greece last year,’ Martha was saying. ‘I took it. I’ve got a copy on my windowsill and I know it’ll make me feel better – more hopeful – knowing you’ve got a picture of him as well. We can keep a vigil – I’ve got a candle in front of mine; a scented one – cinnamon and vanilla.’

Anna stood up.

‘Wait – where are you going? We don’t have to talk about this any more.’

‘It’s fine. I just need to eat, that’s all.’

‘Can I come with you?’

Anna hesitated, unsure whether she wanted Martha in her apartment. ‘Does your mum know where you are?’

‘I told her I was going to my friend, Ellie’s.’

‘For how long?’

‘I didn’t say how long I’d be – and I don’t even have a friend called Ellie.’ Martha shrugged. ‘She doesn’t give a fuck where I am.’

‘Okay – but you’d better bring the bike in with you.’

Anna watched Martha drift round the apartment. ‘Have you finished nosing around?’

‘Almost.’

‘Not the bedroom,’ she called out.

‘I’ve already done the bedroom. I’m in the bathroom.’

The next minute Anna heard the medicine cabinet being opened. She went down the hallway. ‘Martha!’

Martha turned round, smiling. ‘Impressive.’

‘What’s so impressive?’

‘No medication – not even anti-depressants – nothing.’

‘Why would there be?’

Martha ambled back into the living room and went over to the windows, which were streaked with rain again. ‘Mum’s been on and off Lithium for years – now she takes pills to help her sleep – Nytol. D’you have a boyfriend?’

‘No – no, I don’t. Why are you asking?’

Martha was about to say something when Anna’s phone started to ring.

‘Is my daughter with you?’ Laura Deane’s voice said.

Anna hesitated. ‘She is – d’you want to speak to her?’

Martha had turned away from the window and was now staring at her.

‘No – I need her to come home. Can you tell her to do that?’

Anna thought Laura was going to call off then, but she didn’t. ‘What’s she been saying?’

‘Nothing much – she’s just pretty upset.’

‘We had a row.’

Anna was silent.

Laura laughed. ‘I bet she’s been pedalling all sorts of shit about Bryan and me.’

‘No – she’s been fine,’ Anna responded ambivalently, too shocked by Laura’s tone to say anything else, and aware that Martha was watching her intently now.

‘She thinks I’m stupid,’ Laura carried on, ‘telling me she was going to Ellie’s house. I knew exactly where she was going, and she doesn’t have a friend called Ellie. In fact,’ she laughed again, ‘Martha doesn’t have any friends. She just sort of latches onto people until they get sick of her. There was a teacher at school last term she did the same thing to. She had to see the school counsellor after that. There’s something else you should know about Martha – she lies a lot. I mean, she lies compulsively.’

Martha was staring out the window again and had her back turned to Anna.

‘Laura –’

‘I want Martha home – okay? I don’t want you seeing her again and I don’t want you round here either. I want you to stay away from us.’

‘I needed to give a statement.’

‘But you didn’t need to do it here – in my home. You think I’m stupid as well, and you know what? That’s always been your problem, Anna – you underestimate people.’

Laura rang off and Anna placed the phone carefully on the arm of the sofa, staring at it without seeing it.

A few minutes later, still in shock, she said to Martha, ‘That was your mum – she wants you to go home.’

The intimacy of the past hour, which had taken her by surprise, had gone. All she saw was a child she wasn’t responsible for, standing in her apartment looking out of her window – and she didn’t want her there any more.

Martha kept her back turned to Anna. ‘It’s probably a maximum of ten degrees out there today – the sea temperature will be the same. When your deep body temperature drops to thirty-five degrees, you start to feel disorientated and confused. At thirty-four degrees, amnesia sets in. As your temperature drops from thirty-three down to thirty consciousness becomes cloudy until you lose consciousness altogether. If your deep body temperature gets down to twenty-five degrees then you’re probably dead. She hates me.’

‘Your mum? I’m sure she just –’

‘No!’ Martha shouted, adamant. ‘She hates me. This isn’t about her wanting me to go home it’s about control, that’s all. She needs to know she’s got control over me – and you as well. You don’t know her.’

She began hurriedly collecting her stuff, putting on her coat so roughly she ripped it.

‘Let me drive you – it’s pouring out there.’

‘I’m fine.’ Martha pulled the bike aggressively towards her, opening the door to the apartment before Anna had a chance to get there.

‘You’ll get soaked.’

‘It’s only rain.’ She paused at the top of the stairs for a moment, and they stared at each other then looked away.

‘Do you want to know what she was doing before I came over here today?’ Martha said. ‘She was sitting on one of the barstools in the kitchen reading a holiday brochure. I mean, she’s no great reader. That brochure – any brochure – is pretty much about her limit, and she’s working hard at it. When I see her this morning, reading her brochure, I say, “You’re not thinking of going on holiday are you?” and she says, “We’ll see.” And I say, “But, dad –” thinking, I really have got a point, and she just says, “Piss off.”’

Martha was as sullen again now as she’d been standing beside Bryan yesterday morning, in her riding clothes.

Anna was aware that she was waiting for her to say something, and at last said quietly, ‘I don’t think she’s all that keen on you coming over here.’

‘Fuck that. Fuck her.’

They carried the bike awkwardly down the stairs together.

‘You know what I think?’ Martha said, wheeling the bike out into the rain. ‘I think she pushed him over the edge, and that’s why he’s gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘He’s gone,’ Martha said again.

‘Which is different to disappearing?’

‘Completely.’

Anna stared out through the open front door at the Harbourmaster’s office – a nondescript brick building with woodwork painted a depressing shade of blue – thinking.

After Martha had gone, she went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, shutting her eyes, but a few minutes later was up again, looking for the running shoes she’d kicked off earlier. Then her phone started ringing.

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