The Missing Marriage (24 page)

They started kissing, in increasingly deep water under a grey sky.

‘Bryan wanted to go up to the priory, and . . . Do kids still go up to the priory?'

‘Kids will always go up to the priory to do their business.'

‘I said no. I tried to persuade myself that I was thinking of Laura and that I'd done enough damage already, but I wasn't thinking of Laura – neither of us was. I was just scared. Bryan was furious. We drove home after that – via the Clayton Arms. I remember walking into that bar full of men – the storm clouds had broken by then and we were soaked through from the rain. I had no idea what we were doing there.' She broke off. ‘That's when you must have seen us.'

‘Why did Bryan take you there?'

‘He was angry with me.'

‘That's not an answer.'

‘There were two women on stage. Bryan told me that the brunette was my mother.'

‘Was she?'

Anna shrugged. ‘It could have been. She left just after I was born, and I'd only seen her once since.' She remembered running out of the Clayton Arms and trying to make it to a drain, but the drains were flooded in the downpour so she was sick on the pavement instead. ‘He phoned me – the next day – to say he'd made it up. He didn't know why. I didn't know whether to believe him and anyway, the damage was done – it's the only image of Bettina I've ever had, whether I want it or not: a half naked brunette, drugged on a smoky stage. It was as if he was using the idea of her to counterbalance something between us.'

‘Counterbalance?' Laviolette was staring at the carpet near her feet, swinging the well oiled chair rhythmically from side to side still, in a way that made it whisper.

‘A darkness that was in both our lives – I don't know. It was as if he was trying to say that we weren't so different after all, but then – I never said we were.'

‘Then you left,' Laviolette said quietly. ‘I left. Bryan stayed. By the time I came back from my first term at King's – Christmas – Laura Hamilton was three months pregnant and about to become Laura Deane.'

‘Did she get pregnant on purpose?'

‘Probably, but it doesn't really matter, does it? Bryan stayed.'

‘Did you go to the wedding?' he asked, curious.

‘No. I went to Damascus with a Syrian called Khalid. It didn't work out in the long term, but then neither of us expected it to.'

‘Were you invited – to the wedding?'

‘I can't remember. By the time I left university, the Met – along with most of Britain's police forces – were launching a major drive to recruit women (on paper, anyway) in an attempt to revamp an organisation shot through with endemic corruption.'

‘And oestrogen was the answer,' Laviolette put in.

‘I was interviewed on Woman's Hour – along with another female recruit. Mary still has the –'

Before she finished speaking, he said, ‘Why did you come north?'

‘I came looking for Bryan.'

‘And that was before he disappeared,' Laviolette observed.

Anna kept what happened the day after that to herself – for herself.

The day after she'd refused to go up to the priory with Bryan, she let him take her to a house in North Blyth, which felt as though it was being used as a squat. She didn't ask about the house; she didn't ask any questions. This time, in contrast to the day before, they barely spoke; they just went upstairs and made love on a mattress Bryan spread their clothes over in an attempt to cover some of the more sinister stains. There was a curtain still at the window that Bryan managed to draw despite the pole hanging at an angle.

Anna had never felt so naked in her life before, and never so naked since.

They knew, as they were making love – which they did three times, sleeping in between as day turned to night – that this was the moment all other moments in their life would be judged against.

‘Come to London with me.'

‘To do what? Clean the streets? This is my place.'

‘I can't stay.'

‘I know you can't.'

‘I have to go.'

‘I know.' She remembered Bryan pushing the hair from her face, the night air around them thick with the smell of industry – the power station, the aluminium smelting plant.

She was back where she'd started.

It was just after ten in the morning and Laviolette was sitting opposite Jim Cornish, Superintendent, in Jim Cornish's office. There was twenty years of service and a desk full of golf trophies between them, as well as ranks of photographs positioned so that the person sitting in the chair Laviolette was currently sitting in was forced to contemplate them, as Laviolette was doing now. There were a lot of Jim shaking hands with people, and a collection of more personal, family shots. Jim had four children – two girls and two boys – but there was only one photograph showing all four. The rest were of the eldest son, Richard – mostly of him playing rugby – and the two girls, whose names Laviolette couldn't remember. They were displayed to provoke reassurance in those Jim liked, and envy in those he didn't.

The younger son, Dom, had left home at eighteen with a black man, and moved south. He committed suicide five years ago at the age of thirty, but Jim never talked about Dom – nobody did, in fact, apart from Jim's wife. Jim's wife had been on anti-depressants ever since while Jim just carried on with his year-on-year affairs, which he'd been doing ever since the birth of his first child, rugby-playing Richard.

Jim Cornish had started his career at the notorious Berwick Street station where the Deane interviews were conducted. He would hold mattresses over people in the cells while beating them half to death – and he was one of those who remained miraculously untarnished after Berwick Street was exposed, probably because he proved so adaptable to whatever new legislation, and faces accompanying it, was wheeled in. One of the main reasons Jim was so successful at adapting was that he had no self-belief – he was happy to assume, without question, the convictions of others – and he'd always managed to keep his sights on the bigger picture, which had to be upheld at all times, and at all costs.

Jim Cornish didn't view justice as an arm of the law; he viewed it as the enemy. He knew what people wanted – he had a talent for that – and tried to ensure they got it. If people wanted their rapists to be six foot Jamaicans, he made damn sure they were. Who wanted to know that a rapist could also be a married white collar worker in his mid fifties with three children? Nobody. So why spoil somebody's day with an inconvenient and complicated truth. It was selfindulgent and childish.

Jim advised his officers against many courses of action, but there was very little he actually condoned. As far as Jim was concerned, the law's only purpose was to uphold order, and self-denial never changed the world. Laviolette had watched Jim rape a woman once during their early years on the force, but if either of them were embarrassed by that now – if either of them even thought about it as anything other than the caprices of youth – it wasn't Jim.

It was a woman who brought about this morning's summons, and that woman was Laura Deane. It was a formal complaint – Laviolette was harassing her daughter.

Jim's eyes kept flicking between his computer screen and the papers on his desk before resting momentarily on his Detective Inspector.

‘So what's going on?' he said at last.

Jim used to speak almost entirely in profanities but since becoming a latter-life church goer following Dom's suicide – at the invitation of the Chief Superintendent – he made an effort.

‘Martha Deane reckons she saw her dad outside school the other day.'

‘Reckons,' Jim said, staring down mournfully at his desk. ‘What do you reckon, Inspector?'

‘That we need to investigate the claim.'

Jim shifted in his chair, leaning neatly over to one side so that he could look at Laviolette on the diagonal rather than front on – while trying to decide whether he needed to be wary of him or whether he could just feel sorry for him.

‘Problem is, this particular claim comes from a distraught fifteen-year-old who's just lost her dad.'

‘We don't know that.'

‘Come on!' Jim exploded – a mini explosion that was quickly contained but that sent a pen he wasn't even aware he'd been holding, across the desk. ‘This is a classic empathy sighting. Plus the kid's been seeing the school shrink – compulsive lying or something.'

‘Probably inherited,' Laviolette put in.

Jim paused, momentarily confused. ‘Compulsive lying,' he said again, ‘and that's her own mother talking.'

‘And what if it's in her mother's interest to say those things because she doesn't want anyone knowing her husband's still alive? Do you want to know what I'm thinking?'

‘No,' Jim said loudly, leaning forward now and jerking his finger at Laviolette. ‘No, I don't want to know what you're thinking because your thinking is costing us too much.'

‘Bryan Deane faked his own death so that the Deanes can claim on the life insurance.'

Jim started laughing – all tension between them momentarily gone. ‘Yeah, I can see that, but who cares? Is that the kind of stuff you lose sleep over? They're consenting adults.' Then he stopped laughing. ‘Conspiracy theories, Laviolette. Who are conspiracy theories for? The unloved and the unemployed, that's who, and you're only one of those things at the moment.'

‘Are you threatening me?'

‘No, I'm just tired of you. You never change. Your working methods aren't . . . I don't know . . . I'd call them into question. A lot of people would.'

‘Like who?'

Jim waved his hand expansively to one side. ‘There's no order to your work, and that's what we're about here; that's what police work is: order. You've got no anchor. You're not a religious man –'

Jim's eyes dropped automatically to the photographs on the desk in front of him as if those were the just rewards of his religion, which didn't explain Dom's suicide at the age of thirty, but then Jim Cornish wasn't the sort of man who sought explanations.

‘Mrs Deane said the way you've conducted the investigation so far has made her feel persecuted. She's not happy. If she gets any unhappier, I may be forced to take it further.'

‘Since when have I ever been wrong about anything?'

Jim's eyes were on him now, seriously considering this until he found his angle. ‘Since when has that been a skill?' he said, impatient. ‘It's when not to be right – you've never learnt that. If you won't play the game, you've already lost your chances of winning by one hundred percent.'

Laviolette sat half listening to him, thinking that this was how he probably spoke to his children in the study at home – Jim was bound to have a study in his house where he acted out the whole paterfamilias thing before downloading that evening's porn – when they made a bad decision.

Something else Laviolette realised – too late – was that Jim Cornish was most people, and most people trusted Jim Cornish not because he was trustworthy (he was inherently untrustworthy and had a penchant for getting blood on his fists in dark rooms), but because he was like them.

Laviolette wasn't like them.

Jim was watching him, an amused expression on his face. ‘What did I say to you, when you first joined the force?'

‘You only said one thing?'

‘Think of truth as the deformed child we keep locked in the cellar.'

‘Well, at least there's a cellar – that's good to know,' Laviolette said.

Jim Cornish stopped smiling. His eyes ran briskly over the golf trophies, photographs and office walls – the things he held dear; the things he had achieved. Then he stood up, his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘You asked me just now – when have you ever been wrong about anything? Well, you just got wrong,' he announced.

Laviolette stood up as well so that the two men were facing each other. ‘About what?'

‘Bryan Deane's body is in the mortuary. It was washed up this morning. You should go and take a look. DC Wade's down there with Laura Deane as we speak.' Jim grinned at him, knowing that the part that would get to Laviolette most was the fact that DC Wade had been told before him.

‘It's over,' Jim said, still grinning.

*

Laura Deane and DC Wade were just leaving when Laviolette got there, which had probably been the intention. He stopped by the double doors they walked through – still swinging with the momentum of their departure – suddenly, profoundly irritated. He'd wanted to be in the room when Laura Deane and her dead husband were reunited and she made the identification; he'd wanted to be there very badly, and now he'd missed it.

Laura stopped when she saw him, turning so that he got full frontal exposure to her grief. She didn't say anything, she just brought her hands away from her face and let them hang by her side as she stood there so that he could see the unevenly red skin, swollen in all the right places, the make-up – expensive as it was and marketed with a no-run guarantee – beginning to run round the eyes. She let her face do the talking, and the face said, ‘Look at me – this is what a woman looks like when she's just had to indentify her drowned husband's body. I'm in shock, and now I'm officially grieving. You can't touch me.'

Once she saw that he understood, she turned away from him back to DC Wade's firm embrace.

DC Wade, embarrassed, twisted her head round and nodded briefly at Laviolette before leading Laura Deane – a slow-moving combination of white, beige and gold – up the corridor.

Laviolette remained standing there long after they'd gone. Someone emerged from a door close by – and for a second he could hear rock music playing on a radio – stared at him then disappeared through another set of doors, leaving him alone with the inescapable smell of chemicals and a total lack of natural daylight.

A few minutes later, he was looking down at the bloated corpse of a drowned man. The small, tiled room was full of the infinite sadness of departure Laviolette had often felt when confronted with death. There was also nausea – faint, but it was there – because there was nothing human about the remains; they were just remains.

He pressed his back against the tiled wall, his fingertips splayed to either side, contemplating the real possibility that this might be Bryan Deane.

What if it was?

What if it wasn't?

Wouldn't it be kind of wonderful just to go with it – ignore the light he'd seen in Laura Deane's eyes and choose only, in retrospect, to see the grief?

Wouldn't it be kind of wonderful to agree with everyone that death by drowning had really been the forgone conclusion all along, but that protocol had been followed and deployed?

Wouldn't it be kind of wonderful to close the case and move on . . . allow Jim Cornish to shake his hand and squeeze his shoulder?

Wouldn't it be kind of wonderful to just let go?

Wouldn't it be kind of wonderful to stop fighting?

He let his head drop back against the cream-coloured tiles that always provoked in him a shuddering foretaste of violence, as if he expected at any moment to see them sprayed with blood. Then he shut his eyes, but as soon as he shut them Laura's perfume, undercut by a wall of chemicals, became even stronger.

He didn't want the corpse lying in front of him to be Bryan Deane.

He didn't want the search – no, it was more than that; it was a quest that had been going on for over twenty years – to finish here today, like this.

He didn't want the Deanes to win, and he didn't want Anna – he thought about her perched on the edge of the sofa in his study last night – to lose her reason for staying.

He didn't want the story to end here.

Sighing, he took a step closer, thinking again about the light at the back of Laura Deane's eyes. It had only been there for a split second, but it had the effect of changing her expression completely – from one of grief to one of triumph.

Laura Deane thought she'd won; was suddenly sure of it – standing outside in the corridor, staring at him.

Then he remembered something Anna had said about Bryan having had appendicitis surgery. Looking down, he saw no sign of a scar.

He phoned Yvonne – an old friend he'd known since first joining the force, and the only person he could trust right then. Yvonne had never been promoted above the rank of sergeant because she'd never asked to be – if she had, she would have been; people didn't say ‘no' to Yvonne, who was in a league of her own not even Jim Cornish could touch.

Yvonne knew everybody and operated way beyond the perimeters of her job description. She had an entry in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest thimble collection in the world, and both she and her husband – a retired officer who spent his time on planes escorting illegal immigrants home – collected porcelain figurines.

‘I hear you've got a body,' she said – brusque; wry.

‘Yeah, I'm with it now – only it's not
my
body.'

‘It isn't?'

‘I'm sure of it.'

‘Based on?'

‘Nothing much other than the absence of an appendicitis scar. Yvonne – I need you to run a check – all missing persons reported in the last six months.'

‘Because?'

‘This isn't Bryan Deane.'

Laviolette banged open the double doors and started to run – along the corridor and through the building, its daylight levels increasing as he ran – until he was standing in the car park in full sunlight, breathless.

He wanted to know where Laura Deane had gone after identifying her missing husband in a mortuary.

But there was no sign of a silver Lexus 4x4 parked anywhere.

Laviolette walked, distracted, to where his own car was usually parked, and stood staring at the black Volkswagen Polo in front of him, waiting for it to transmogrify into a burgundy Vauxhall Cavalier.

But it didn't.

Then he remembered that he hadn't been able to get his usual spot that morning, but couldn't remember where he had actually parked his car – he was going to have to check all one thousand bays.