Читать книгу The Missing Marriage - Sarah May - Страница 9

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.

‘Come and look,’ Laura called out.

The sun was bouncing frantically off whatever it was she was holding in her hand – a penknife – then the next minute she leant into the tree and carved something into the trunk.

Anna started to climb again with renewed determination until a shadow – a large, loud, moving shadow – cut through the sunshine, and the branches at the top of the tree began to shake aggressively as if they’d suddenly woken up to the fact that two trespassers were among them. She heard shouting from below and, looking down, saw that Erwin was no longer in the river but on the grass, running towards the tree, his trousers rolled up at the knee still. Mary’s book lay open on the rug and she was standing staring helplessly up at the sky.

There was a helicopter hovering above them – it had come to take Laura away only Laura was too busy carving her initials into the trunk of the tree to notice.

Anna tried to call out, but the helicopter was too loud, getting louder . . .

She woke up suddenly, and thought at first that the sound was the wind turbines on the north harbour wall – then she remembered. The sound she could hear – the sound that had cut through her dream – was the sound of helicopters. It was Easter Sunday and they were searching for Bryan Deane because Bryan Deane had gone missing.

The light in the bedroom was dull, which made her think it was still early when in fact – grabbing at the pile of clothes by the side of the bed and shaking them until her watch and phone fell out – it was almost half ten.

Putting on the watch, she lay back on the pillow for a while, staring at the ceiling, then got out of bed, her legs heavy.

She walked to the window through the pile of clothes she’d dropped back on the floor and pulled up the blind. Pressing her forehead and the palm of one hand against the cold glass, she took in the rolling grey sky and sea, a fair part of which was taken up by one of the endless succession of super tankers either bringing coal from Poland or Norwegian wood pulp across the North Sea for the British press to turn into newspapers. Her mother, Bettina, used to work in the offices at South Harbour and Erwin, drunk, once told Anna that her father was a Norwegian from one of the ships.

It was dirty weather – squalid; nothing like yesterday – and the sea had an inhospitable rolling swell of about six feet.

A hard sea to survive in, Anna thought.

Through the glass she could hear the cabling on the trawlers moored to the quayside down below, ringing. The third trawler, Flora’s Fancy, was making its way between the pierheads and out into open sea past the wind turbines, which were turning today – all except the one second from the end on the left by the old coal staithes. There was always one that stood still and silent no matter how hard the others turned.

Just then a red Coastguard helicopter flew over the trawler and turbines, heading straight out to sea before turning and looping southwards back inland.

Anna went into the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of muesli – making a mental note to shop at some point – as another helicopter went overhead.

It wasn’t the Coastguard this time, but an RAF Rescue helicopter that would have come from the base at Kinross.

Then her phone started ringing.

She went into the bedroom where she’d left it – it was Laviolette, sooner than she’d expected. Forgetting what he’d said to her before slamming the door of the Vauxhall shut in the early hours of the morning, she asked quickly, ‘Has anything come in yet?’

‘Nothing. We’ve launched a full scale open search with MCA collaboration this morning. Conditions aren’t great, but they’re meant to be getting better. Boats have gone out from Tynemouth, Cullercoats and Blyth, and a couple of private fishing vessels have volunteered to assist.’ He hesitated as if about to ask her something then changed his mind. ‘But nothing’s come in yet.’

In the silence that followed there was the sound of furniture moving, a child whining and Laviolette’s voice, talking to the child, making an effort to soften itself.

‘I can hear helicopters – down the line. Where are you?’ he asked abruptly.

Caught off guard, she said, ‘My flat. I just saw the Coastguard and RAF helicopters go out to sea.’

‘You’ve got a sea view? South Harbour or Quayside?’

‘Quayside,’ she said, wondering how he knew she was in Blyth.

He paused, but didn’t comment on this. ‘I’ve got a feeling Martha Deane might try to contact you. If she does that I want you to let me know.’ Without giving her time to respond to this, he carried on, ‘Did you call Laura Deane yet?’

‘No.’ Anna wasn’t sure she was going to call Laura Deane.

‘Did she call you?’

‘No.’

‘Okay, well – we’ll speak, and don’t forget to call me if you get any visitors.’

Laviolette ended the call, and Anna, forgetting the half eaten bowl of muesli in the other room, decided to go for a run. She was about to leave the apartment when the phone started ringing again. This time it was Mary – Erwin had had a bad night, and wasn’t any better this morning.

‘Have you phoned the hospital?’

‘They say to come in, but he says he doesn’t want to. It’s his breathing, Anna.’

‘I’m phoning the hospital. I’ll see if they can send someone to you and if they can’t he’s going to have to go in. Does he have a patient number – reference number – anything I need to quote when I phone?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mary said, close to tears. ‘I don’t know any more. Don and Doreen have gone over to be with Laura – she still hasn’t had any news. It’s hard to believe –’ Mary broke off. The improbability of Bryan Deane’s disappearance had fractured her resolve with regards to Erwin’s cancer, and right now she wasn’t coping.

‘Smoker’s cancer’ was how her grandmother, Mary, had referred to the small cell lung cancer Erwin had been diagnosed with. After nearly forty years underground on twenty to thirty cigarettes a day, Mary wasn’t surprised, and implied that Anna shouldn’t be either. It was how women of Mary’s generation were used to losing their men. They hadn’t wanted to tell her, but –

‘But it might only be weeks, pet.’ Mary’s voice cracking ever so slightly.

It was the ‘pet’ that did it – not the news of Erwin’s imminent death, but the ‘pet’. Anna was crying; something she rarely did. Or at least, the tears were running, but she wasn’t making any sound.

‘I’m sorry, pet, but I thought you should know.’

Then came the hours of phone calls to the specialist and primary care team.

Erwin’s cancer was ‘metastatic’, the medical term for ‘hopeless’. There was no hope for Erwin. There was no point his having surgery or even radiotherapy because the cancer was no longer confined, but spreading. He’d been given the course of chemotherapy not as a potential cure, but to ease the pain of his ending.

According to the specialist, Erwin didn’t want any more chemotherapy so they were putting him on morphine tablets instead.

That was when Anna had left London and headed north for the first time in just over a year. She’d had extensive conversations with various cancer specialists and had driven up the M1 feeling vaguely determined and prepared. Mary’s phone call had enabled her to unplug herself from her London life in a way she’d been attempting but failing to for some months now, she realised.

As she pushed on at eighty miles an hour past Northampton, Nottingham, Leeds, York, Durham she wondered if this was what she’d been waiting for . . . an excuse to come back. But, come back to what?

When she pulled up in the late afternoon outside the council house that was her childhood home – number nineteen Parkview – Mary seemed confused, distant, and almost embarrassed.

She’d gone into the kitchenette to make tea and left Anna to face Erwin alone after calling out, ‘Anna’s here,’ making it sound like she’d travelled hardly any distance at all.

Erwin was sitting on the sofa in the lounge beneath the framed copper engraving of the Chillingham Cattle. He was watching Tom & Jerry cartoons, his mouth open – smiling. His clothes looked too big and his skin was grey. There were some specks of dried blood on his upper lip from an earlier nose bleed, and he was wearing a cap because of hair loss from the chemotherapy.

‘Granddad!’ By the time she said it, she’d been standing in the lounge doorway for what seemed like ages.

He’d looked up – reluctantly – from the cartoon, still smiling, still rubbing his hands together where the skin had gone dry between thumb and forefinger.

‘Alright, pet,’ he said automatically, as if she’d just come from upstairs or the kitchenette. He tried to engage in her, but he wasn’t really that interested. In fact, he was almost impatient, waiting for her to leave the room; the house . . . go back to London. The man who’d loved her all her life.

It struck Anna that neither of them wanted her here; that they were embarrassed about Erwin dying with her there. Alone, together, they knew how to behave with each other, and with death in the house, but they didn’t know how to behave with her there.

She didn’t know what to say and, leaving him in front of Tom and Jerry, went into the kitchenette, closing the door gently behind her.

Mary tensed, but carried on putting the teapot on the table next to the tea set that usually lived in the china cabinet in the lounge.

She sat down at the small drop-leaf table and poured their tea.

Anna noted, relieved, that the table was set for two.

Erwin, who’d never watched daytime TV in his life before, was left in front of Tom and Jerry.

‘Why didn’t you tell me sooner?’ Anna said at last when Mary showed no signs of breaking the silence other than to ask if she’d had a good journey up, and how work was.

She finished her mouthful slowly, prudishly. ‘We didn’t know ourselves until recently.’

‘Well, why didn’t you tell me when you knew?’

‘What could you of done?’ Mary let out, angry. ‘What can you do now? What are you going to do? What are you doing here?’ she finished, exasperated and suddenly tearful. ‘He’s dying.’

‘I know,’ Anna said, angry herself now; raising her voice. Only she hadn’t known; not really; not until she’d seen him on the sofa just now in front of Tom and Jerry. The man who’d been a father to her, and who’d been so strong still even at the age of fifty when she was born; who she’d always thought of as invincible.

The air cleared after that and Mary had been happy to take Anna through the small pharmacy lined up under the key rack – a gift from a school trip to Scarborough – on the kitchen bench beside the microwave: the slow-release morphine tablets, anti-inflammatory tablets, anti-sickness tablets and laxatives.

All the labels on the pots had been turned to face outwards. Mary was almost proud of them, and was waiting for some comment from Anna, who tried to think of something to say but couldn’t.

Instead she got up to pour herself a glass of water at the sink, and saw through the nets at the window that it was the garden where the cancer had taken its toll. The house was as still and immaculate as always, but the garden . . . Erwin’s shed was the only thing to rise out of the debris with any semblance of its former self. The plot that had fed the Fausts, their freezer, and many neighbours was laid to waste. The shed looked embarrassed – as though it was just about holding onto its dignity with the help of the crocheted curtain, white still at the tiny window.

Looking out at the garden, Anna finally felt afraid; afraid of what was happening here at number nineteen Parkview, and afraid of what was going to happen. Erwin and Mary had been there all her life; they brought her up when her mother disappeared off the face of the earth – grandparents who became parents again. She wasn’t losing a grandfather; she was losing a father.

Erwin had an appointment at the hospital the next day, and although they let Anna drive them because she was there, she knew they’d have preferred to go on the bus like they usually did.

They weren’t doing any tests – it was just a consultation to see how things were going to be at the end, as Mary put it, re-arranging the brooch in her scarf.

Anna was left outside in a waiting area, on a blue chair next to a water dispenser and wire rack full of cancer care leaflets.

Erwin and Mary had gone into Dr Nadafi’s room – Mary had long since got over her agitation at being assigned a ‘coloured’ man – and sat down in front of his desk. Before the door shut, Anna saw them taking hold of each other’s hands beneath the desk, and her heart broke suddenly for them.

The waiting room, which had been empty, soon filled with young couples, children, a teenage girl and her parents.

Unnerved, Anna stood up to get herself some water from the dispenser, her hands shaking, aware that people were staring. She felt them wondering about her, briefly, then went to wait in the corridor – standing against an old radiator whose heat she could feel through her jeans.

‘You didn’t have to hang about,’ Mary said when they came out, verging on angry.

‘For C-christ’s sake, Nan!’ Anna was angry herself now. ‘We could have got the bus home,’ Mary persisted. ‘I want to be here. Just let me be here.’

Erwin, looking stunned still from the consultation, said nothing.

‘I need the toilet.’ Mary set off down the corridor. ‘Where’s she going?’ Erwin asked Anna, in a panic at the sight of Mary’s retreating back.

‘Just the toilet.’

Erwin nodded as Mary called back over her shoulder, ‘Take him down to Out-Patients – we’ve got a prescription to pick up from the pharmacy.’

Anna started walking towards the stairs when Erwin grabbed hold of her suddenly and pulled her back, staring intently at her and chewing rapidly on the inside of his cheek.

It felt like the first time he’d even noticed her since she’d arrived the day before.

‘Whatever she says – I want you to be here, you know, at the end.’

She cut him off. ‘Granddad.’

‘Please,’ he insisted, keeping a tight grip on her arm, his breath rasping. ‘I mean it.’

He hadn’t really spoken to her until now, and, listening to him, she was aware of his accent – how German he sounded.

‘Not for me,’ he added. ‘For Mary. You have to be there for her because I’ll be leaving her alone.’

Anna put her hand over his, which was still gripping her upper arm. ‘You know I will. You know that.’

‘Hearing’s the last thing to go,’ he started to mumble, more to himself than her, ‘isn’t that strange? You’ve got to carry on talking to me even when I lose consciousness, even when you think that might be it. You’ve got to keep on talking because I’ll still be able to hear you.’

‘I will.’

He nodded and they carried on walking down the stairs, following the blue signs to Out-Patients.

Mary stood by the bedroom window at number nineteen Parkview, looking out for the nurse the hospital was sending them. Her poise of earlier weeks was shattered after having spent an entire night lying next to someone she was convinced was dying. When Anna, angry, asked her why she hadn’t phoned earlier, all she could think to say was, ‘What was the point?’ – unsure even what she’d meant by that.

‘Where’s the nurse?’ Mary said irritably.

Anna, sitting in a G-Plan chair that was as old as the house and still upholstered in its original Everglade green, shut her eyes. She held on tight to Erwin’s hand. His face was turned towards her, his mouth open – rasping. As soon as she so much as started to loosen her grip, his hand slid away from her down the side of the bed, and that scared her. The furniture in the room, like the carpet she remembered from childhood with its dense pattern of ferns, was still in good condition so had never been replaced. Neither Erwin nor Mary would have dreamed of growing tired of these things before they became threadbare.

Everything in the house had been earned and that’s why the television set was covered with a blanket to protect it from dust when it wasn’t being used; why the stereo was kept in the box it came in unless it was being played. Even now, the house was as clean and tidy as it had always been because for Mary and Erwin’s generation cleanliness and tidiness were the only things separating them from the lost and the damned: the drinkers, the fornicators, the unemployed and the hungry.

‘How was Laura last night?’ Mary asked after a while.

Anna hadn’t been expecting this. ‘In shock.’

‘It’s funny – you can’t have seen her in, what – fifteen years or something?’

‘Sixteen.’

Mary turned away from the window to look at her, pausing. ‘And yet, you and Laura, when you were growing up, you were like this,’ she said, twisting her fingers together in spite of the arthritis. ‘You were close to Bryan as well – at one time. He used to wait for you coming home from school – off the Newcastle bus, d’you remember?’

Anna did. She could see him now – waiting on the flower troughs outside the station, next to the Italian café, Moscadini’s. They’d walk back from the station down to Hartford Estate together, sometimes talking, sometimes not – Bryan in something barely resembling a uniform and Anna in her navy blue and red Grammar School colours, the beribboned hat pushed in her bag. She’d been glad of the company – and the protection – because it was a risky and unpleasant business getting home to Parkview in a Grammar School uniform.

‘He was forever in our back garden, drawing some miniscule insect with his magnifying glass.’

Anna stared at Mary. She’d forgotten that Bryan drew, and she’d forgotten all about his magnifying glass as well, which had a resonance for her she fought to remember, but couldn’t right then.

‘Have you got any of his pictures still?’ she asked suddenly.

‘Probably. Somewhere. I’m sure I put some up in the wash house. That poor child,’ she added, lost in thought and barely aware now of Erwin’s rhythmic rasping. ‘He was as good as orphaned – the Strike on one side and suicide on the other. It was Bryan who found her, you know.’

‘Found who?’

‘His mother – Rachel. What a thing to come home from school to. You won’t remember –’

But Anna did remember. She remembered because it had been a Monday – wash day – and Bryan had come running through all Mary’s sheets, hanging from the line she had propped cloud high, and Mary had yelled at him until she’d seen his face, and the dark patch on his trousers where he’d wet himself.

Mary took him inside number nineteen and ran a bath – and that was the first time Anna saw Bryan Deane naked; at the age of twelve, the day his mother died.

‘It was hard on Bryan – he was Rachel’s favourite. They said all sorts of things about Bobby Deane after that, but I don’t think Bobby ever laid so much as a finger on Rachel, she was just lonely that’s all – you know, that real loneliness; the sort you can’t escape from. Bobby was a Union Official – he was working twelve hours a day and more. They said all sorts about Rachel as well,’ Mary carried on, ‘about how Bryan wasn’t even Bobby’s because there was a darkness to him that none of the other Deanes had.’ She sighed.

‘Bryan?’

Mary nodded. ‘During the Strike, Rachel took to spending a lot of time with somebody Bobby sang with on the colliery choir. She liked to sing as well. I think it was just companionship, but it wasn’t something you did back then. Men and women weren’t friends. You stayed in your own home . . . your own backyard. You didn’t take to wandering, however innocent that wandering might be. There were rules – and Rachel was never very good at rules; she used to say she felt suffocated.’

‘So who was Rachel’s friend?’

Mary hesitated. ‘A widower, but a widower still counted as another woman’s husband if you were married yourself, and Rachel was. He was a safety engineer at Bates.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He died in an accident. You’ve got no colour,’ she said suddenly to Anna.

‘I’m not sleeping well.’

‘I can tell. That’s what make up’s for, you know – the bad days.’ Her eyes moved, disgruntled, over Anna’s running clothes – noting them for the first time – before she turned to look out the window again.

An optimistically red Nissan was busy parking on the street below, and a woman was getting out and glancing up at the house.

‘That hair.’

‘What about my hair?’ Anna patted her head.

‘Not yours.’

‘Whose hair, Nan?’

Short term memory loss and lack of concentration were meant to be side effects of the morphine they were giving Erwin, but if anything it was Mary who was suffering these symptoms on his behalf. The thought that Mary might be siphoning off some of Erwin’s morphine crossed Anna’s mind – and not for the first time either.

‘Laura could have had anyone with that hair, and yet she chose Bryan Deane.’

‘Or he chose her.’

‘Maybe, but if you’d asked me all them years ago who was most likely to end up with Bryan Deane, I’d have said you were. Don’t look at me like that. I used to see you together. You didn’t grow up alone. I was there as well, remember?’

She glanced at Erwin, whose head had rolled back onto the pillow, exhausted, his mouth open and the breath rattling through it still.

‘He stopped breathing last night, and I was so angry with him,’ she said, becoming increasingly distressed. ‘I was angry with him for making me that afraid. I’m angry with him for dying, Anna. I’m just – angry. I feel angry the whole time. Love hangs on strange threads,’ Mary concluded, making an effort to control the tears.

Anna left Erwin – and Mary – with the nurse, Susan, who was in her late forties and who entered the Fausts’ lives with fortitude, humour, the re-issued eau de toilette of Poison, and a portable oxygen canister.

Within minutes of her stepping inside number nineteen Parkview, normality had been restored and the terrors of the night vanquished. By the time Anna left, Erwin was breathing normally and Susan was sitting at the drop-leaf table in the kitchenette with Mary.

Anna got into her car and paused for a minute – pressing her forehead hard into the steering wheel before turning on the engine and driving out of the estate past the parade of shops where Mo’s used to be. Curious about the shop that had featured so prominently throughout her childhood, she parked the car.

There were only two shops still open on the Parade – a fish and chip shop called The Seven Seas, and the convenience store that used to be Mo’s – although this wasn’t immediately apparent given the caging across the windows on the outside of both.

There was no longer a post office inside Mo’s, but the security glass had been retained – behind which there was a till, an overweight girl in a tracksuit, a child, and most of the shop’s alcoholic stock.

‘Milk and eggs?’ Anna asked, not particularly hopeful.

‘Back of the shop – in the fridge.’

She felt the girl’s eyes on her as she made her way towards the back of the shop, which smelt of underlying damp and rotten lino.

Anna recognised the lino – it had been there in Mo’s time when there had been a baker’s, butcher’s, grocer’s, hardware store, chemist and hairdresser’s owned by Mo’s twin sister on the Parade. It was where all the women on the estate used to go to get their hair done, including Anna when she was small. She hated getting her hair cut so much that Mary used to have to bring one of Erwin’s belts with her to the salon so that they could tie her into the chair in order to keep her still.

She and Laura used to spend most of their summers walking between Mo’s shop, the park and home. Anna could even remember the way Mo’s used to smell – of sherbet, newsprint and hairspray from the salon next door. There had been a pink and green rocket outside whose presence it was difficult to justify given that nobody she knew ever had ten pence to spend on a rocket ride – the pennies they pooled together went on sweet things.

They would walk sluggishly, tipping back sherbet, towards the park the houses on Parkview overlooked to the rear. A park that had been in perpetual decline, and whose play equipment – erected on concrete in the hedonistic days before health and safety – was painted metal that got chipped and rusted, a fall off which resulted in broken teeth, fractured elbows, hairline cracks to the skull and tetanus jabs.

Anna would sit behind Laura on the metal horse as the sun moved across the sky, not speaking, surrounded by roses that never seemed to bloom, the horse’s rusting saddle dying their thighs a feint red – until the big boys crawled up out of the sewage outlet where they kept their stash of pornography and sniffed glue. When the big boys appeared it was time to go home, but if they were out of glue, and walked in a straight line still with eyes that weren’t red, they let Laura and Anna play chicken with them on the railway line that ran between the Alcan aluminium smelting plant to the north, and Cambois power station to the south – the power station whose four chimneys would have filled the horizon through her apartment windows at the Ridley Arms if they hadn’t been demolished in 2003.

Until the summer Jamie Deane, Bryan’s older brother, put his hand up Laura’s skirt and Anna and Laura stopped going to the play park.

The memory took Anna by surprise, and for a moment she forgot what she was doing and stood staring into the fridge at the back of the shop. She’d forgotten all about Jamie Deane.

‘You alright?’ the girl shouted out.

Anna jerked in reaction to this, getting the milk and eggs out of the fridge and walking back towards the glass booth at the front. Distracted, she pushed the money across the counter, took her change and was about to leave when she said, ‘You’re not by any chance related to Mo are you?’

‘Daughter.’ It was said without hesitation, and without interest – as if nothing she ever heard or said would change her fate; this included.

‘Say hi to her for me, will you? Hi from Anna – the German’s granddaughter.’

‘She’s dead,’ the girl said, without expression.

Anna quickly left the shop with an acute sense of depression – not only at the demise of Mo’s empire, but at her lineage as well. Mo herself had been a large, bright, singing woman with a sense of humour that could cut you in two.

The same couldn’t be said of her daughter.

She was about to get into her car when something caught her eye – a burgundy Vauxhall, parked outside one of the bungalows arranged in a semi-circle round the green that the Parade backed onto. Retirement bungalows – most of them in pretty good repair still, the gardens well tended.

While outdated burgundy Vauxhalls weren’t exactly unique – especially not here on the Hartford Estate – Anna was certain that the one parked in front of the bungalows opposite was the one she’d been in the night before; the one belonging to Inspector Laviolette.

She got into her car and phoned Mary.

‘You’re not back at the flat already?’

‘No – I stopped at Mo’s.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Milk. And eggs. Nan, you know the bungalows behind Mo’s?’

‘Armstrong Crescent?’

‘I don’t know. Nice gardens –’

‘Armstrong Crescent,’ Mary said again.

‘Do you know anybody who lives there?’

Mary hesitated. ‘It’s where they re-housed Bobby Deane. After he started drinking.’ She hesitated again, as if about to add something to this, but in the end changed her mind.