by Sarah May
The tension had gone, and Laura felt as if the moment contained her entire life and that her entire life had somehow managed to fit itself into this sun filled room.
‘I was so scared this afternoon,’ she said, after a while. ‘The flat was empty and I didn’t know where you were, and I thought, what if you just decided to go? What if this time you really had disappeared?’
She needed him to say something; reassure her, but he just pulled gently away, distracted again now.
He opened the balcony doors, breathing in the night air, and for some reason, watching him, she felt affronted – it was as if he was trying to curtail any further intimacy.
‘You won’t do it again, will you?’ she persisted.
He stepped onto the balcony, resuming his earlier pose by the railings. ‘Won’t do what?’
‘Disappear like that.’
He didn’t answer at first, staring intently up at the sky as if trying to find something new up there. When he eventually turned to her, it was to say, ‘Did you go to Erwin Faust’s funeral?’
And at the mention of the name, Faust, there was Anna – where she always was – standing there between them.
Martha was sitting on the sofa watching TV with the sound off while listening to one of Bryan’s Led Zeppelin CDs. She’d drunk almost half a bottle of vodka and was feeling vaguely sick when the doorbell rang so she got up slowly, aware that her head was starting to hurt.
She saw – simultaneously – the man in the front porch and the white van parked on the street, and realised who it was.
They stood staring at each other, neither of them moving.
Jamie’s face wore a large uncomfortable smile that gradually slid off in a way that made it look as though he was rapidly being emptied of himself. He continued to stare at her, his eyes wide and shot through with red, the two veins on either side of his forehead, pronounced.
‘Laura,’ he said hoarsely, leaving his mouth hanging open in his unshaven face.
Martha, unsure, remained holding onto the door, watching the spider’s web that was tattooed across the left hand side of his neck ripple as he stretched out his hand and ran it over her hair.
She somehow stood still until he lifted his hand from her head, running it instead over the silver number two in the brickwork to the side of the door – illuminated by a small uplighter – as if all this pleased him.
‘I’m Martha,’ she whispered.
‘Martha,’ he repeated as the street lights blinked on to orange. ‘The daughter.’
He caught his lower lip beneath his teeth then his face broke into a smile, and everything was suddenly brought back up to speed. ‘Fucking terrified me, you did,’ he carried on in the same hoarse voice, ‘when you first opened that door and I saw you standing there.’
‘Sorry,’ Martha apologised.
‘The hair . . . everything. I wasn’t expecting that. It made me feel – I don’t know – somehow wounded.’ He shook his head at her then swung away, his eyes running over the other houses on the street. The spider’s web was broken up now by the creases in his neck as he tilted his head back to exhale, and his hair was so short she could see the white skin of his scalp. This provoked a rising pity in her, and she was too young to realise that pity was a dangerous emotion, so stayed standing in the doorway – able to hear Led Zeppelin playing on the sitting room stereo still. ‘But not the eyes,’ he said, swinging back towards her. ‘You’ve got kind eyes.’
He got a pack of Benson and Hedges from his pocket and sat down on the edge of the porch.
Martha watched him light up – flicking the ash into one of Laura’s ornamental bays.
‘Is she here?’
Martha hesitated then shook her head.
‘Know when she’ll be back?’
Martha shook her head again then carried on watching him, her head hurting now. She saw Mrs McClaren run past – resplendent in neon Lycra – raising her arm in a wave, but didn’t wave back.
‘They never told you about me, did they?’ he said, squinting up at her. ‘You had no idea I even existed.’ He stood up and ran his hand over her hair again, which made her spine tingle and her stomach feel strange.
Without knowing why, she felt an overwhelming urge to step onto the porch, take hold of him and dance down the drive. She could picture them, clearly, dancing up Marine Drive, across the main road and over the dunes onto the beach.
‘You phoned – Easter Sunday. You phoned mum’s mobile, but I picked up.’
‘Easter Sunday,’ Jamie repeated, thinking about this. ‘That was you?’
Martha nodded, pleased. ‘You sounded so like dad, I thought –’
‘That was you?’ Jamie said again, interrupting her. His eyes were as wide open as they’d been when she first opened the door, only more preoccupied. ‘Did you tell her I’d phoned?’
‘I told her.’ Martha hesitated. ‘She said you’d been in prison – but that doesn’t explain why she was so scared.’
‘Did she say why I was in prison?’
‘You killed a man.’
‘She told you that?’
‘No – a friend did.’
Jamie contemplated her blankly.
‘Well your friend was wrong. I never killed nobody.’
‘Then, why –’
‘I lost my alibi.’ Before Martha had time to comment on this, Jamie said, ‘They knew I hadn’t done it.’
‘Who?’
‘The police. They wanted me because I already had a string of convictions for GBH. They told me again and again what I’d done and how I’d done it until I started thinking maybe I did do it. I had to keep on telling myself, I couldn’t of done it because the afternoon that man was killed . . . I spent that afternoon with Laura. We were together.’ He looked suddenly agitated. ‘We were together that whole afternoon.’
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.’
Chapter 14
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 ofte
n 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 D
eane 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.