Sarah May - The Missing Marriage

‘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.