the kitchenette from the living room.
She went through, her feet silent in the carpet’s thick pile.
Doreen’s skin was too loose and thin to absorb the tears whose run-off was cascading from the edge of her chin onto her dressing gown.
‘I’ve come out without my keys and there’s nobody at home. I’m locked out, Mary,’ she said – as if this failing on her part far outweighed her son-in-law’s disappearance. ‘Stupid – stupid,’ she moaned, distraught with anger, thumping her left fist into her lap.
Anna Faust slowed down, steering the yellow Ford Capri, in which she’d driven north the previous Saturday, into the small Duneside development outside Seaton Sluice where the Deanes lived. A wind was picking up, making the flags ring on their masts at the entrance to the estate while shifting the sea fret that had come in with the tide that afternoon – a dense, rolling blanket of fog this stretch of the north-east coast was famous for.
It was Easter Saturday and unnaturally quiet after London – something she hadn’t got used to yet.
Marine Drive was a road of four- and five-bedroom detached homes whose uniform banality could only be described as ‘executive’ – a marketing ploy that explained nothing and promised everything. The houses backed onto the main road, but had sea views.
The Deanes’ house – the first one, number two – was as honey-coloured as the rest of the houses on Marine Drive, which all gave the impression that they’d been tailored to suit the needs of their owners when in fact it was the owners who’d been trained – by forces far greater than themselves – to fulfil the requirements of the houses. Requirements including, but not limited to – Anna took a glance at number two and its immediate neighbours – a household income of at least eighty thousand, and a minimum of two cars to fill the double garage and drive. Preferably children – definitely pets.
After more than a decade in London ‘eighty thousand’ had lost its meaning, but up here it was still hard to come by – still currency.
She cast her eyes instinctively over the puddles of architectural foliage in the front garden of number two, then back up at the honey-coloured façade, aware that she was looking for signs of Bryan in all this.
Anna hadn’t seen Bryan or Bryan’s wife, Laura, since she and Laura were eighteen when Laura Deane had been Laura Hamilton still. But she knew all about the Deanes and their house at number two Marine Drive – Mary had described it in such breathless detail – because Mary approved of the Deanes and the way the Deanes lived their lives in a way she didn’t approve of Anna.
At Friday’s Methodist Church coffee morning, Mary would talk loudly and insistently about her granddaughter, Anna, and while she was talking, still loudly, still proudly, she was trying simultaneously to fathom why it was Anna lived so far away, and why it was Anna lived alone.
She’d always been ambitious for her granddaughter, but Anna’s achievements didn’t translate into anything she – or anybody else at the Methodist Church coffee morning – understood. While Laura Deane had a four-bedroom house with a conservatory and separate utility room. She had a beautiful kitchen with an in-built microwave the size of an oven. People understood these things, and such recognisable achievements were given their due reverence by the Friday morning audience.
Unlike the Hartford Estate – where Anna, Laura, and Bryan had all grown up and where Anna’s grandparents and Laura’s parents still lived – Marine Drive didn’t often see police squad cars, but tonight there was one parked on the drive to number two, sandwiched between two other cars. One of those Anna recognised as belonging to Laura’s father, Don Hamilton, and the other one had to be Laura’s.
Don – like Erwin Faust – used to work at Hartford Pit, and when that closed down Don got work at Bates and Erwin, who was near retirement, got work cleaning the buses at the Ashington Depot. He was still referred to locally as ‘the German’ by the older generation because he’d spent most of the war as a POW in Camp Eden, Stanton.
As she got out of her car, sensor-triggered security lighting suddenly illuminated the driveway and front garden of number two and she saw Don Hamilton walking towards his car.
‘Don!’
He stared at her, not recognising her for a moment. ‘Anna?’
‘Nan’s just phoned – about Bryan.’
As if embarrassed at this disturbance of the peace his family was responsible for, Don shook his head, which had been sporting the same Teddy boy haircut for as long as Anna had known him.
He’d put on a shirt, pressed trousers, sports jacket and loafers – with buckles that shone under the security lighting – in order to face the unexpected tragedy of his son-in-law’s disappearance. It disturbed Don profoundly because he didn’t think things like this happened to people who lived in four-bedroom detached houses. He thought his daughter was safe from harm inside number two Marine Drive, but here was a police car parked on the drive where Bryan’s 4x4 should have been.
‘You didn’t have to come over.’
‘Don, it’s fine.’
Anna didn’t tell him she’d come to give a statement because when Mary phoned just after midnight, it occurred to her – beyond the shock – that she was probably the last person to have seen Bryan, that afternoon on the beach.
‘The police are in there speaking to Laura – asking questions.’
‘They’ll just be routine ones,’ Anna reassured him. He looked like he needed reassuring. He looked, in fact, as though someone had been stamping all over his face, and he was trying hard not to bear any grudges.
‘They sounded bloody weird to me – some of them.’
‘It’s not easy, I know, but they have to ask them.’
Don wasn’t listening any more. ‘They wanted to search the house as well.’
‘It’s just routine – standard procedure. It’s what they do.’
‘Well, I didn’t think it was right for Martha to hear all of that. I wanted her to wait in the car with me, but she wouldn’t. She said she wanted to be there when they were speaking to Laura. They asked her questions as well – Martha.’
Anna had seen the Deanes’ fifteen-year-old daughter for the first time that morning – dressed in riding clothes with a brown velvet hat hooked under her arm, hitting lightly at the side of her boots with a crop. A tall, shy girl, who had stood possessively close to Bryan on the pavement outside number seventeen Parkview on the Hartford Estate.
Don stared helplessly at Anna. ‘She’s in her pyjamas still. I drove her over in her pyjamas. Saturdays she stays with us – I take her to Keenley’s Stables.’ He ran his tongue nervously round his mouth. ‘Laura and Bryan have to work Saturdays, but I suppose it gives them a bit of time together afterwards – just the two of them,’ he finished, uncertain.
Anna gave his elbow a squeeze, surprised to find, standing next to him, that they were the same height. She’d always thought of Don as a towering man. ‘You get on home. This business with Bryan will sort itself out.’
She stood on the drive and waited for him to put the car into gear and reverse, then move off slowly up the street, obedient to
