The Missing Marriage (20 page)

Martha didn't feel well. ‘Mum was your alibi?'

Jamie pushed his hands in his pockets and started nodding rapidly in the same way he had earlier, when she first opened the front door.

‘She lied. She told them that afternoon never happened, but we were there – the two of us – in that room. I know it happened. That afternoon changed everything.'

Martha was sitting in Sally Pearson's office. She knew why she was there and was in the process of shutting herself down – something which had the unnerving effect of making people think she'd literally vacated herself.

First her eyes went dead then all expression left her face, and finally she let her body sink in on itself.

Even Miss Pearson's professional brightness lost its glow at the sight of her.

‘Martha,' she exhaled, her long earrings shaking.

Sally Pearson was the school's educational psychologist.

They were sitting opposite each other at a table with a vase of stargazer lilies and an arrangement of sea shells between them. The room smelt of flowers, perfume, dust, nail varnish and futility.

Martha stared at the sea shells while Miss Pearson worked hard at maintaining her bright smile.

Out the corner of her eye, Martha saw her splay out her hands, check her nails then quickly curl her fingers back together. She was wearing an engagement ring she hadn't been wearing the last time Martha saw her.

‘Is it too hot in here? Shall we open the window?'

Miss Pearson got up and opened the window with difficulty.

Martha watched her struggle and felt a fleeting pity she managed to suppress by reminding herself that no matter how professional Miss Pearson tried to appear, she couldn't conceal the fact that she didn't like Martha very much.

‘That's better,' she said as she sat back down, glancing at her watch. ‘Which shell is it that you're interested in? This one?'

Miss Pearson picked up a shell at random and turned it round in her hands.

Martha could feel sweat collecting behind her knees and felt a sudden desperate urge to wash her hands. She often got this urge when she was nervous.

Miss Pearson fixed Martha with eyes that were becoming increasingly unsettled.

‘Your mother phoned the school this morning. She told me that you claim to have seen your father yesterday after school – outside the main entrance.'

Her mouth twitched fatally, and Martha watched, fascinated, thinking she was about to start laughing.

‘I don't claim to have seen him. I saw him.' Martha swallowed loudly. ‘Why is it that people are held to account for telling the truth far more than they are for lying?'

Not expecting an answer, she looked away, concentrating on the shells again, silent.

Laura met Laviolette at the entrance to the priory ruins, and they walked from there down onto the beach at King Edward's bay. The beach was full – a patchwork of small, temporary encampments that Laura and Laviolette surveyed from the curving promenade.

People enjoying the last of the Indian summer glanced at them as they made their way laden, shouting, down onto the sand – the children running ahead, their faces open wide with excitement.

Laura felt a pang she couldn't put a name to that she tidied quickly, efficiently away.

‘Has Martha contacted you at all?'

‘Martha? No.' Laviolette stood with his hands clasped, his arms balanced on the promenade railings, the metal hot from the sun.

He spoke with his usual slow, easy manner, but Laura sensed his alertness as he continued to stare down at the beach, watching a group of children approach the rock pools with nets.

‘I was worried she might have done.'

‘Worried?' He turned to face her, but her sunglasses concealed the better part of her face.

‘She says she's seen Bryan.'

‘When?'

‘Yesterday – outside school. I wasn't sure if she'd already phoned you or –' Laura fell silent. ‘I contacted the school this morning to let them know.

The Inspector straightened up, his hands on the railing still.

‘Why did you phone the school?'

‘I want her to see the psychologist – she's very good. Martha's seen her before. Martha lies, Inspector. We were told she does it to control things she doesn't have any control over.'

‘You think Martha's lying about having seen Bryan?'

Laura laughed in disbelief. ‘Of course she's lying. She didn't see Bryan – she couldn't have.'

‘Why not?'

‘Because he's dead, that's why,' she finished angrily, turning away from him and starting to walk back up the steps when he caught hole of her arm.

She studied his fingers briefly where they were gripping her, before slowly pulling her arm away.

‘Bryan's dead,' she insisted. ‘I'm trying to come to terms with it. I'm trying hard, and some days are just about bearable. Martha's got to start living with the fact sooner or later.' Laura paused, and when the Inspector didn't say anything, added, ‘I just wanted to warn you. I thought it was the right thing to do.'

Laviolette nodded, preoccupied. ‘Warn me?'

‘I thought she might have phoned you,' Laura said again, ‘and that you might start deploying people . . . resources . . . when you don't know Martha.'

People arriving at the beach and people leaving, stopped and stared, but Laura couldn't see their eyes. Like her, most of them were in sunglasses. They looked like beetles all of them, their heads flicking suddenly in her direction. Some of them recognised her from the appeal, but nobody said anything, they just stood there, staring, poised somewhere between curiosity and judgement.

As she watched Laviolette's retreating back, the shirt wet, clinging to his spine, she felt the onset of one of the anxiety attacks that she'd been having at least three times a week since Bryan's disappearance. Hot, breathless, tearful she pushed her way up the steps onto the cliff top path, but when she got there it was as if all the buildings – even the thirteenth century priory ruins – had turned to face her and were conspiring to topple and bury her alive.

Laviolette parked the car on double yellows under the shade of a burgeoning hornbeam. He was excited. Excitement wasn't something he often felt, but he was excited now.

The heat was forcing women – they were all women – out of the cars lining the road outside the Grammar School entrance, and they stood in well-groomed groups talking, laughing, waiting. These women took care of themselves; had time on their hands that Laviolette, watching, guessed it was sometimes an effort to fill. They wanted to belong – to what they weren't quite sure, but the overall plan was that they and their children should belong. He thought of Laura Deane. Some of the women he could see through his windscreen had been born belonging; others had to work at it. He imagined that quite a few of the ones working at it had seen parents die of exhaustion before they got to claim their pensions, which was probably enough for them to have made vows never to grow so old so young themselves. Their mothers would have been too busy working to take them to school, and their mother's mothers probably went to school barefoot with a potato in their pocket.

Quite a lot of them would remember being hit as children by parents trying to teach them the difference between good and bad, which was a love of sorts even if those same parents were too exhausted to show any other sort. The heat finally forced him out of his car as well and, sensing movement, a group of women close by – all dressed in white – turned towards him, but all they saw was a man in his late forties emerging from an outdated burgundy Vauxhall. They turned away.

Laviolette smiled affably at their backs, and sat down on the crumbling brick wall surrounding the hornbeam – a wall that was in the process of being destroyed by the tree's roots.

He looked along the length of road filled with cars, coaches and two competing ice cream vans, and wondered where exactly Martha had seen Bryan the day before. There was an elderly man in a cap and braces watching his Jack Russell pee against a car tyre, and two shirtless builders, laughing, but none of these were Bryan Deane.

From somewhere inside the large stone building opposite, behind the glossy black railings, bells started ringing. There was a pause. The women shifted expectantly, and the leaves on the hornbeam started to move, making the shadow on the pavement by his feet move with them as a breeze picked up.

He stood up instinctively as the women's laughter and conversation became louder in an attempt to meet the sounds now filling the air – of twelve hundred girls leaving a building they'd been compelled to remain inside for seven hours. The red and blue uniforms spilt onto the street, flowing in all directions. Laviolette felt momentarily overwhelmed. How was he going to find Martha in all this?

The women dispersed – plans made, news exchanged – their focus now on the girls as they stood by their cars shouting and waving. The flood was thinning, but there was still no sign of Martha.

He was looking instinctively at the girls leaving school alone, the girls without a pack, with curled postures and eyes – when they lifted their heads to check for traffic while crossing the road – that were unnervingly alert. That was Martha, he thought, realising for the first time how fond of her he'd become.

Then someone sounded their horn and that's when he saw her, looking up like the rest of them, but more expectant. She looked through the slow moving traffic at a white transit van parked about one hundred metres away.

Jamie Deane.

Laviolette started walking towards it as Martha appeared on the pavement in front of him. She was smiling, and as the passenger door swung open the radio could be heard, playing loud.

‘Martha!' he called out.

She couldn't hear him above Jamie Deane's radio.

‘Martha!'

This time she paused, her bag swung back over her shoulder as she looked down the street. Then she saw him, and hesitated – momentarily confused before pulling herself quickly up into the van.

Laviolette broke into a run as Jamie Deane started to manoeuvre the van out of the parking space. He got there just before it pulled away, and banged once on the window.

Martha's face – pale, agitated – stared at him through the glass, and beyond her he saw Jamie Deane for the first time in twenty years.

Martha turned away and said something to Jamie that made them both start laughing hysterically as the van jumped forward and joined the rest of the traffic on the road.

Laviolette jogged alongside it for a while until he had to stop, sweating and breathless. He watched it disappear from sight, blinking to keep the sweat from running into his eyes.

Jamie hadn't planned to pick Martha up from school – he'd been making a delivery in the area and passed a primary school just as all the children came running out of their classrooms into the playground. He parked the van for a moment and watched them navigate their afterschool freedom before turning the engine back on and pulling away – with something close to contentment.

It was then that he thought of Martha.

He had no idea what time she finished, but it was likely to be somewhere between half three and four. He was there at three thirty, parked up a side street. When the bell went, he drove round the corner and got a spot opposite one of the ice cream vans just as someone was leaving. He sat with the engine running and the radio playing, nonplussed by the volume of girls in uniform. After twenty years living in and among uniforms, he wasn't daunted at having to pick out a face in a crowd.

The unstructured hours of his new life made him anxious and depressed – his counsellor had warned him they would – so he was pleased once he'd set himself the task of picking up Martha from school. He had somewhere he needed to be and something he needed to do.

He was only just discovering the real horror of imprisonment – that it made you terrified of freedom.

Martha. His niece, Martha. Martha had been a shock to him; he'd been wholly unprepared for the effect she had on him. While he'd been inside Laura, Bryan and others – but mostly Laura – had remained imaginatively real to him, but he had no real concept of Laura and Bryan's daughter because she'd never really existed for him.

When the door to number two Marine Drive opened the night before, he really did think it was Laura standing in front of him, framed in the doorway. After twenty years, it was entirely possible and reasonable to him that he should find her exactly as he'd left her and it took him a while to come to terms with the fact that the girl he thought was Laura was in fact Laura's daughter. It was then that he saw her walking through the school gates and started to energetically sound his horn.

Her face did exactly what he wanted it to when she saw him: it opened up – surprise followed by pleasure. He was so happy he was virtually bouncing in his seat by the time she'd crossed the road and got to the van. He leant over the passenger seat and threw open the door for her and that's when she hesitated.

He let out a sound midway between a laugh and a choke, suddenly terrified she was about to change her mind, but then she jumped up into the seat, slamming the door shut and locking it. A second later there was a man outside, banging on the window. Jamie tilted his head to stare at the man's palms, which looked swollen and white against the glass – like those of a drowned man.

‘It's the Inspector,' Martha said, in shock. ‘Laviolette.'

At the sound of the name, Jamie burst out laughing, the tattooed web on the side of his neck taking the strain of the sudden hysteria.

Without knowing why, Martha started laughing as well.

The sight of the Inspector, sweating on the pavement as they pulled away, struck her suddenly as the most absurd thing in the world. She pressed her left hand into her stomach – she was laughing so hard it was bruising her muscles – watching in the wing mirror as the Inspector continued to reduce in size by the second until he disappeared altogether when they turned right at the end of the road.

After this, they felt silent.

Martha sat clutching her rucksack on her lap, looking around the van, out the window and eventually at Jamie.

‘Where are we going?'