The Loving Husband (12 page)

It had been hot that day even out in the fen, a warm ripe smell coming off the fields and a heat haze as she and Emme had walked back from the shop in the next village, a shimmer rising from the straight road. There had been cut golden stubble on one side and black earth on the other, the hedges dark. As the farmhouse came back into view for a moment the chicken barn disappeared behind it, the nearest bungalow fell away and all she could see was the house’s tall handsome outline and the long grass of their field bleached pale and soft behind it, rippling as far as the poplars. She’d felt Emme’s hot hand in hers, and looking down at the neat parting, the patient set of her small shoulders, she’d thought, Well. People have it worse than this, people a century ago lived like this.

So when Nathan came home happy, too, it just seemed to fit, with the day: she didn’t want to look at it too hard. She’d made supper and his hand had been on hers every time she laid down her knife. Then when she got up to load the dishwasher he’d been behind her, his hands light on her hips. In fact, for a moment she
had
hesitated – thinking, Hold on. Hold on. After all this time? – but she hadn’t quite dared to say it. Sod it, she’d thought, why not? Why not? And when it turned out to be a one-off, well, she was too busy throwing up to start on rehearsing those conversations, again.

She didn’t know if Ben had been part of the plan, but it wasn’t like Nathan was a man who rolled over and touched her out of habit, or need, and if she knew nothing else about him, she knew he always had a plan.

So soon enough she was taking the bus in to Oakenham with a growing belly, she couldn’t have ridden a bike if she’d wanted to. And one warm afternoon, sitting beside the buggy on a bench by the river, Emme asleep in it, her shopping in its knotted bags hanging from the handles, Fran had closed her eyes in the sun, had told herself, it was all right. It was all suspended, while Emme slept. Then she opened her eyes and there was a man on the bridge standing there, looking at her, and time started again.

Fran did think sometimes, almost with a start, of the Nathan who had walked into Jo’s front room, scraped and battered like a teenager from the scooter accident, because he hadn’t left London with them, he wasn’t the man she lived with now, the man who watched her, frowning, who lay beside her sleeping as still and separate as a statue. Sometimes she wondered who that Nathan had been, and where he’d gone. It was almost as if she’d dreamed him, and now she’d woken up to find he’d never really been there at all.

Something woke her in the chilly thin light of early afternoon, and she jerked upright, disorientated. She was fully dressed on top of the bed, Ben beside her in his sleepsuit, and when Fran saw him, it all came rushing back, a tidal wave.

Not even a day had passed, not even another night. She still had that to come.

She swivelled on the bed in search of the radio alarm clock: four thirty-two. Her stomach growled, hollow, but she felt sick. They’d left less than an hour before, going for the panic button.

‘We’ll be back,’ Gerard had said, his hand on her elbow, warm and heavy. ‘Don’t worry.’

She’d lain beside Ben on the bed as he wriggled, suddenly overcome with the need for sleep: he must have dropped off beside her, mercifully. They’d have gone back to the police station for other reasons, too, wouldn’t they? They’d be talking about her, about what she’d said, they’d be adding things up.

‘Ed’ll have another word at the pub,’ Gerard had said as they climbed into the car. ‘Someone will have seen something. We’ll get him, Fran.’ A reassuring smile, a direct look, into her eyes: she wanted to believe him. She wanted to trust them. On the bed with her eyes closed she had repeated it, a mantra. We’ll get him.

What had woken her? In her chest her heart had gone straight from sleep to panic, hammering. Her legs felt heavy, her arms weighed down but she made herself go to the front window to look, standing off to one side, in case. Nothing. No one.

She came down slowly, she could feel the fear in the roots of her hair. Out through the kitchen in a daze, unbolt the door and then stand there, on the doorstep, holding her breath. Thinking, Foxes, broad daylight, looking round her cluttered yard as if she’d never seen it before. The row of wheelie bins, the uneven slates on the shed roof, the broken guttering. The gravel. Then she turned again, to look at the kitchen window, fearful, not wanting to see that tiny nick again, looking anywhere but at the glass.

On the window sill Emme’s treasures: an oyster shell she had unearthed somewhere, miles from the sea; a miniature watering can Fran had given her for her birthday. The watering can was on its side – somewhere in Fran’s head a tiny alarm set up, she felt her heart pick up speed. There was the long rectangular terracotta pot they’d planted up with hyacinth bulbs, back in their old life, months back before Christmas. The green tips had just started showing, last week? The week before? A lifetime ago. Fran stopped. She stopped breathing.

Where were they? The tips. She could see only earth, nothing green. As if the world had gone into reverse, as if all around her things had stopped living, growing.

And then her hands were in the wide pot, scrabbling, unearthing one bulb after another topsy-turvy in the soil, unable to make sense of why, who … until it came into her hand, as if meant to be there. The black handle of a knife.

She could hear them talking outside in the yard. They had been on their way over with the panic button anyway, Gerard said, when the car pulled up outside less than ten minutes after she called. They’d found her there, in the middle of the kitchen with her back to the window, dirt under her fingernails, trying to stop the trembling.

The forensics guys took longer to arrive, but they were there now, and when she saw the white suits out there beyond the glass it was as if it was starting all over again.

‘She found it,’ Gerard was saying. Standing at the door she could hear him, the voice he used for other men, dry, sceptical. ‘At first she said she didn’t recognise it. Never seen it before.’

How was she to know? A knife covered in blood and soil? How could that be anything to do with her? How could it be the same knife that lived, blade-tip down for safety, in the jar of kitchen implements beside the sink? Only when Gerard had asked again, had insisted, had she looked. Only then had she seen it was not there, and she’d heard a sound come out of her own throat that she didn’t recognise, a sound so hysterical she had to put her hands over her mouth to shut herself up.

She heard footsteps. When Gerard came back in she was sitting back down at the table in front of the mug of tea they’d made her.

‘It’s going off for analysis,’ said Gerard, pulling the chair out beside her. ‘It’s all right, Fran.’ As if she was a child. ‘It’s all right.’ It wasn’t. It wasn’t all right.

Carswell came in, breezy. ‘All right if I set this up now?’ he said, prising at the box they’d brought with them. Panic button. The thing he took out looked cheap, a black plastic box with two buttons, one red, one black.

‘Nathan must have heard something outside,’ she said slowly. Her brain felt like a swamp, things stirring, surfacing. ‘Don’t you think? He must have grabbed the knife, maybe he heard something…’ She stopped, and then her head was in her hands, just to stop them looking at her, Carswell curious, Gerard’s smile set to compassion but something else behind it.

‘We’re hoping the forensic analysis will give us some leads, there,’ said Gerard, reassuring, his hand hovering over her shoulder. ‘It’s good you hardly touched it. Finding the murder weapon’s a big step forward.’ He glanced sideways at Carswell, then back. ‘Really, a big step.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You going to show her how it works?’

She had had to get out: her cue was the white-suited forensics officer sticking his head round the kitchen door to say they were off. Gerard had followed her outside, beyond the shed, looking through the chicken barn. She wanted him to go away.

They’d stood either side of her, Carswell showing her how the gadget set and reset; Gerard had been giving her the rundown, earnest, absolutely intent on her. Because they hadn’t just been coming over to show her the panic button.

Gerard had waited till she stepped away from Carswell: it was just a button and another one to reset it, he only had to show her twice. ‘We’ve been to your husband’s office, Fran,’ he said, and when she turned quickly she saw him watching her for a reaction.

‘There are officers working round the clock.’ Gerard’s eyes following her face. ‘We’re looking at everything we can think of. Who might have seen him at the pub: the landlady’s on her way back from the cash and carry now, we’re going there straight after this. Your husband’s friends, this Robert Webster, who he’s caught up with since he got back, his exact movements last night. There’s CCTV we’re examining on a couple of junctions.’ A pause. ‘His business dealings.’

Then Gerard had stepped closer to her, taking his voice down a notch and Carswell had turned away, fiddling with his gadget still. ‘I know you’re still in a state of … shock, and finding the weapon must have been very traumatic. But…’ and he let out a weary sigh, ‘Mrs Hall. Fran. I’m finding it frustrating, how little you feel able to tell us. It’s as if you’ve been sitting at home with your fingers in your ears and a blindfold on.’ The picture was so vivid she felt panic rise inside her, and she’d blundered past him to the door, needing air. He’d followed her out into the yard, she felt like flailing him away from her.

He’d walked patiently behind her as she set off blindly away from the house, catching up with her at the barn. ‘His office,’ he repeated now. ‘You’re seriously telling me you never went there?’ It sounded like an accusation.

The sky was low and leaden and the wind had moved round, coming from the north. Direct from Siberia: it was relentless. At the back of her brain panic ticked: he brought the knife with him. Right up to the house. He buried it there.

‘He didn’t … we didn’t…’ She took a breath, swallowed. ‘I knew where it was. The Sandpiper.’

‘He’d been there, how long?’ A note of impatience had crept into Gerard’s voice.

‘Almost a year.’ Did she need to go through it all, her offering to be Nathan’s secretary, the subject just getting dropped, all that? ‘He’s a project manager, he wouldn’t be there half the time. I didn’t go and see him for the same reason I didn’t go into his study. He liked to keep work and home separate.’

Suddenly Fran wished she’d asked the FLO to come over, she should have insisted. The woman. Ali Compton.

‘Does your wife come and bring you lunch then?’ she said, then wished she hadn’t, felt anger rise. ‘And what about those tights? The pair of tights.’

‘If I had a wife,’ said Gerard, and he studied her. ‘I’ve put the tights in for analysis but you know…’ He exhaled impatiently. ‘This is the country. You find all sorts, in ditches, fields, lay-bys. Lads.’

Lay-bys. Fran remembered a news story, from a few months after they moved, the early autumn and the half-burned body of a woman had been found in a lay-by off the motorway – the same road you could hear if you stepped out beyond the barn. She’d pointed to the picture in the paper when – finally, about ten at night – Nathan had come in, pale, tired-looking, from the terraced houses that had turned into a nightmare, he said, something to do with listed building consent.

She wasn’t sure where the houses he’d been working on were. The first time she’d asked she thought he’d said Oakenham, but she must have got it wrong because he said the motorway had been stationary on the way home and Oakenham was nowhere near the motorway.

‘Drugs,’ was all he’d said, then turned away.

Fran had felt a small shock at the coldness in his voice, as if it was directed at her. ‘How do you know?’

I’ve never done drugs
, she wanted to say, indignant, and although that was in a way misleading, given the life she’d had with Nick, it was also true, not her thing, plus her mother had been there, done that, sitting on the Indian throw over the collapsing sofa, ash from an untidy joint dusting her cardigan.

Nathan shrugged, his back to her. ‘Isn’t it all down to drugs, these days?’ but he only sounded non-committal now and she wondered if she’d imagined it. That he was reproaching her for her former life, or was it something else, some old bitterness, something she didn’t know about? Someone else? He’d never talked about previous girlfriends. But when he turned round again he had been smiling and offering her tea.

Now it was Gerard with his back to her, as if he had stopped listening. He was looking at a battered little car moving beyond the barn, beyond the field; he raised a hand to his eyes.

The car was heading for the village, and they both turned back towards the house, as if it might be coming there. It went out of sight and there was Carswell at the back door, waving.

‘Kid’s awake,’ he called. ‘Upstairs.’

Fran ran. She was on the landing with Ben, red-faced and thrashing in her arms, when she heard the car pulling up outside and she froze. ‘Could be Ali,’ she heard muttered from the kitchen and she started down the stairs, her heart suddenly lifting at the thought of Ali Compton.

But it was Karen. At the foot of the stairs Fran saw her big frame in the doorway to the yard, bundled in a big coat with purple fur at the collar. Wellies with flowers on them, and Emme and Harry behind her. Fran got up, marvelling that her brain had hidden Emme away, protecting her. Then feeling the dangerous rush, love didn’t seem enough of a word for it as Emme looked up, the careful guarded look, the neat fringe. Then she and Harry barrelled past and into the room, not looking at the two men stationed one at the cooker, the other at the sink, and they were pounding upstairs.

‘All right?’ said Karen, looking only at Fran.

And Fran felt something ease inside her, at the sound of her reedy insistent voice. Four months in that school playground, the little windswept huddles of mothers with their backs turned to her, like a punishment, and Karen the only other outsider.

‘The knife,’ she said. ‘We … they … I found a knife. They think it’s the … weapon.’