by Sarah May
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.
He started to walk through the car park.
By the time he’d located the Vauxhall – somewhere he had no recollection of leaving it – he’d tried Laura’s mobile, the landlines at number two Marine Drive, Starz Salon, and Don Hamilton. Laura clearly hadn’t told her parents about the body in the mortuary.
Laura Deane was nowhere to be found.
He tried Anna’s mobile, but she wasn’t picking up either – so phoned the house. It had been too late and they’d drunk too much the night before for Anna to drive back to Blyth, so she’d spent the night on the sofa in the study. He hadn’t seen her before leaving that morning – she’d still been asleep.
Mrs Kelly picked up. He could hear Harvey, in the background, irate. ‘Is Anna there?’
‘Anna?’ Mrs Kelly – distracted by Harvey who was outraged that his pipe cleaner cuboid was refusing to stand level on the table – was at a loss.
‘Last night?’
‘Oh. Anna.’ Mrs Kelly said the name shyly. ‘She left.’
‘When?’
‘Not long ago.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
‘No, she didn’t really say anything. Just a minute –’ He heard her trying to calm Harvey. ‘I was going to do a stew for tonight – is that okay?’ she said, hesitant.
‘Fine – that’s fine.’
‘Oh, and Harvey’s got his appointment in North Shields later – so we won’t be back until six.’
Mrs Kelly’s mention of North Shields was entirely incidental, but it triggered something in Laviolette. He’d forgotten about North Shields, and that was something he shouldn’t have done.
The Deanes had a flat in North Shields that they rented out – at the Royal Quays Marina.
Anna had woken that morning on the sofa in Laviolette’s study, in Laviolette’s house with a feeling of empty panic at having given something away, drunk, that in daylight she regretted, and daylight was staring down at her through the skylight as she swung her legs over the edge of the sofa into a sitting position, staring down at her bare feet in the carpet as if they had nothing to do with her.
Laviolette had left without waking her.
Uncertain, she went downstairs and attempted to talk first to Harvey then Mrs Kelly. Harvey was easier, but Mrs Kelly did offer to make her coffee. She had the impression they were waiting to go out – had been waiting for some time – but that Mrs Kelly didn’t want to leave her in the house alone. Anna also guessed – from both Harvey and Mrs Kelly’s reaction to her presence – that visitors at number four Coastguard Cottages were a rarity. She tried to think of some way to reassure them both, but in the end gave up.
She took her coffee upstairs with her after telling Mrs Kelly she’d be leaving in ten minutes, and sat on the sofa in the study again looking round the room more intently now she was alone in it. She thought about Harvey – downstairs – and what Laviolette had said about him being there the day Roger Laviolette had been killed. A minute later, she was pulling down the old projector box with the interview tapes in it, from the shelves.
The cine projector was in the box still, the clearly labelled tapes slotted down either side of the incommodious machine. Anna found herself wondering – like she had with the car when she first met Laviolette the night Bryan disappeared – if the old projector was even his, and if it was, what had it been used for? She couldn’t imagine – from the things he’d said the night before – that the early years of his married life were times anyone would want to capture and replay.
They’d listened to all the tapes, Anna realised, apart from the one she’d just come across – the one she’d seen Laviolette hesitate over the night before, and withhold. Anna stared down at the tape, which had her grandmother’s name on it: Mary Faust.
She wanted to play it on Laviolette’s machine then and there, but could hear Mrs Kelly on the stairs. So she’d taken it with her – without hesitation – feeling entitled to it while wondering briefly how long it would take for him to miss it.
Why had police interviewed Mary after Roger Laviolette’s death?
It was starting to rain, but Laviolette barely noticed as he dialled DC Wade’s number.
‘What have we got on the Deane’s flat – the one at the marina in North Shields?’
There was a pause on the other end of the line. ‘I’m sorry, sir, I’m not following,’ Veronica said at last.
‘The Deanes have a flat,’ Laviolette said, tersely, articulating each word, ‘in North Shields at the Royal Quays Marina.’
‘I understand that.’
‘What did Laura Deane tell us about the flat?’
‘You want me to look in the case file?’
‘Yes, I want you to look in the case file.’
‘But, Inspector, this morning –’
‘This morning, what?’
‘The mortuary,’ DC Wade said, helplessly, anxious to resolve the situation without dispute. ‘I was there in the room with Mrs Deane, sir. I was there.’
Laviolette was trying not to lose patience. He didn’t want to push her too hard, even though that was his inclination, because if he pushed DC Wade too hard, she might go running to Jim Cornish, and this situation that Laviolette was playing out right now was just the sort of situation Jim was looking for.
‘We all want this case closed, Wade, but there’s the coroner’s report still to come and while we’re waiting on that, I just want to review the case file – make sure we asked everything we were meant to when we were meant to. I don’t want anything coming back to haunt us when this is closed, that’s all,’ he concluded.
‘So it’s not an investigative request as such?’
‘Not as such, no. It’s –’
‘Administrative?’ she suggested helpfully, happy to have made sense of the Inspector’s request at last. He was being thorough, that was all.
‘So you want me to check what went down on file regarding the North Shields property?’
‘Please.’
‘I’ll take a look.’
Veronica phoned back twenty minutes later.
‘What did you find?’
‘Nothing much. Mrs Deane confirmed they had a second property let through Tyneside Properties – we cross-checked with them. That’s it.
’
‘Great, we can sign that off then.’
‘So – that’s it?’ Veronica said, relieved.
‘That’s it.’
When Laura walked into the marina flat, Tom was standing by the dining table, absently shuffling some drawings into a pile.
‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ he said, his mind elsewhere.
He walked past her into the kitchen and started to methodically load the dishwasher. She remained where she was in the middle of the living room and watched him load it in the same perverse way he’d always done, which meant that everything had to be rinsed in the sink afterwards because it never got washed properly.
She’d stopped letting him stack the dishwasher at number two Marine Drive for precisely this reason, but here she’d felt no compulsion to do that.
The silence was awkward.
It was a silence that needed words, that tried seeking for them, but that couldn’t find any.
‘D’you want a tea or coffee?’
‘I brought champagne,’ she said, moving at last over to the kitchen doorway and leaning against the frame.
‘Champagne?’ He didn’t understand.
‘You died today – it’s almost official.’
He carried on drying his hands on the tea towel. ‘I did?’
‘I saw you over an hour ago, laid out in the mortuary. I identified you. I cried.’
She was poised, watching him, waiting for him to get it.
‘You did?’ he said, in the same distant tone.
‘You drowned. You got washed up in the harbour at Cullercoats. A fisherman found you.’ She paused, still waiting. ‘Bryan – there’s no catch. We’ve just got to wait for the coroner’s report. Then –’
He walked slowly past her, still holding the tea towel, and sat down on the sofa in the living room.
‘So – we’re nearly done here?’
She nodded, sitting down on the coffee table, on top of a pile of his drawings and taking hold of his hands. Instead of bringing them together, the body in the mortuary had somehow come between them.
‘What did he look like – this drowned man?’
‘Like – nothing.’
He pulled his hands out of her grasp and fell back against the sofa, preoccupied.