This book is dedicated to George Gowans and Robert Hutchinson, who spent too long underground . . . and to the women they left behind.

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Prologue

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Chapter 14

      Chapter 15

      Chapter 16

      Chapter 17

      Chapter 18

      Chapter 19

      Chapter 20

      Acknowledgements

      About the Author

       Praise for Sarah May’s novels

       By the same author

      Copyright

       About the Publisher

      Prologue

      Anna Faust saw Bryan Deane three times the day he disappeared – twice on land, and once in the sea. There was nothing remarkable about this. A lot of people saw Bryan the day he disappeared – people who knew him as Bryan Deane, and people who didn’t. The fact that Anna saw him six months later near the old bandstand on South beach – newly painted in a retina jumping white – was remarkable. It was remarkable because only the day before the Blyth coroner had announced an open verdict on the disappearance of Bryan Deane on Saturday 11 April 2008 – Easter Saturday – age thirty-five.

      Bryan Deane was officially missing presumed dead the day Anna saw him on South beach.

      His brown hair, which used to have natural auburn highlights when the sun caught it, had been bleached Scandinavian blond. He’d lost about two stone in weight as well, which had the effect of making him look taller.

      The man Anna saw that day – the only other person on the beach apart from herself and a bundled up woman yelling at a black Labrador standing motionless in the long rolling sea – looked nothing like Bryan Deane, but she recognised him immediately despite the distance between them. She felt him in her stomach and lungs as a rising nausea, which was where she had always felt Bryan Deane ever since she first laid eyes on him in the summer of 1985 when she was eleven and he was twelve. It was how she felt him six months ago after seeing him for the first time in sixteen years, stood next to his fifteen-year-old daughter, Martha, the day he disappeared.

      And when she saw him on South beach, the day after the coroner’s verdict was given, it didn’t surprise her; it was confirmation of what she had somehow known all along – Bryan Deane hadn’t disappeared so much as failed to return . . . as Bryan Deane, anyway.

      But then men – and occasionally women – have disappeared under circumstances far more infamous than those surrounding Bryan Deane; so infamous, in fact, that they have gone down in history.

      Take Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who mounted his donkey one night as sixth Fatimid Caliph and sixteenth Ismaili Imam, and rode into the al-Muqattan hills outside Cairo – only to dismount from the same donkey as somebody completely different. Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah was never seen or heard of again.

      Tsar Alexander I went so far as to die at Tagarog and be interred at the St Peter and Paul Cathedral of the Peter and Paul Fortress, St Petersburg – all so that he could go on living life, in one version of the story anyway, as Feodor Kuzmich in Siberia. When Soviet authorities opened Alexander’s tomb in 1925, it was empty.

      Who knows what prompted Ducat, Marshal and the Occasional – all three of them lighthouse keepers on Flannan Isles – to vacate their lives so suddenly one day that they left their beds unmade, the clocks stopped, a chair overturned by the kitchen table, and one set of oilskins hanging still from their peg? And who thought to ask John Stonehouse whether he preferred life as John Stonehouse, Labour MP, or – following the collapse of his companies, revelations about his extra-marital affair, and his own drowning – as a man called Joe Markham?

      As Anna Faust walked into the Deanes’ house – and marriage – on Easter Saturday 2008, she knew that disappearances were classified as victimless crimes. But where did that leave Bryan’s stunned yet immaculate, highlighted blonde wife, Laura? Or his daughter, Martha?

      Even the Spaniel, Roxy, sprawled impartially over Laura Deane’s carefully positioned feet, had rolling eyes as she attempted to grapple with the notion – both instinctive and observed – that an event of such seismic significance had occurred that Laura had forgotten to feed her. Laura had also sat on her where she lay curled up and blinking in the corner of the sofa, waiting patiently for Strictly Come Dancing to be switched on. Not only sat on her, but become uncharacteristically furious. Laura really wasn’t herself tonight, Roxy thought.

      Then the police arrived.

      Chapter 1

      It was almost midnight when Doreen Hamilton stepped through the front door to number seventeen Parkview and pulled it shut behind her. Holding onto the latch, she swung her body – buttoned up from throat to ankles in a quilted dressing gown that had been a Christmas gift from her daughter, Laura – away from her home of over fifty years into the night. Panting, she peered blindly through the retreating fret at the only thing she could see – the streetlight growing out of the pavement on the other side of the garden wall – and let go of the latch.

      Keeping the orange streetlight to her left, she shuffled in slippers – which predated the dressing gown by a year and which had a navy blue fleur de lys Doreen had never seen embroidered on them – along the front of the house, feeling her way.

      When she ran out of house, she turned left – the orange light was ahead of her now – following the path until she reached the gate. It was a relief to feel its solid wood beneath her hands, and she stood there for a moment running her fingers nimbly over the edges of a sign made for them by their granddaughter, Martha, in more innocent times. She’d never seen the sign – she’d never seen the pink and yellow patio tiles paving the garden either or the stone wishing well and oak barrel planter where a relatively robust looking dwarf conifer was growing, circled by primroses – but she knew what it said: No leaflets or junk mail.

      Her breath was quick and hissing. She could hear it – a sound close by – as she clicked up the latch and opened the gate. Out on the pavement there were other sounds – sounds that didn’t belong here on the edges of the Hartford Estate where families wanting to stay afloat above the tide of social debris put in for transfers to; where vegetables were grown, laundry dried outside, and windows cleaned. The sounds came from the centre of the estate – a primitive black hole with severed amenities, boarded-up windows and bonfires burning day and night – where things had gone bad.

      Feeling suddenly fretful, Doreen felt out the gate to the house next door, number nineteen,