by Sarah May
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 be
ach. 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.