The Loving Husband (15 page)

‘Who?’ The old voice was suspicious, and hoarse with underuse.

The mobile had taken its time recharging. The message box told her she had four unread messages but she didn’t open any of them. Nathan hadn’t gone to the pub. Hadn’t been going to the pub. All those times he left the house in the evening when she could have done with him there, on the sofa, going up to Emme when she panicked, when she cried. Where had he been going?

She went straight to the address book, not even sure if she had his number but she did.

‘Fran,’ she said. ‘Nathan’s … wife.’ She had not spoken to him since their visit, although she’d sent carefully composed cards, with photographs of the children – his grandchildren. She was in the bedroom. Ben, who’d woken again, his routine all out of whack, as she waited for the mobile to charge, was staring up at her from the bouncer at her feet, then frowning down at a row of plastic elephants strung across it.

She could hear Carswell and Gerard in Nathan’s study – they’d put on blue latex gloves. Carswell had snapped his at the wrist, grinning at her behind Gerard’s back.

Shit, she thought, the mobile sweaty in her hand, shit, shit, I can’t do this.

‘Mr Hall, something’s happened to Nathan. I’m so sorry. I’m…’

Ben went still in the bouncer, looking for the source of alarm.

Family. They’d swabbed her for DNA, they’d taken her fingerprints. She wasn’t family.

‘Spit it out,’ he said, sharply, and for a moment it was as though a different man was speaking, a man used to being in charge. She told him.

There was a long silence when she’d finished, and when he spoke the authority was all gone. ‘It was an accident?’ He asked that several times.

‘We don’t know,’ was all she could say. ‘I don’t think so.’

But he didn’t seem to process that. ‘He was always reckless,’ he said, gravelly voiced though Fran couldn’t tell if it was due to emotion. He seemed paralysed: if she didn’t ask a question he fell silent. ‘I thought I should tell Miranda,’ she said tentatively. Silence. She tried again. ‘Should I tell Miranda?’

‘Miranda?’ He repeated the name as if she was a stranger.

Below her Ben was frowning with concentration at the elephants, dark-browed. She persevered. Eventually Nathan’s father agreed, he’d call Miranda. ‘She’s very busy, you know,’ he said, sounding aggrieved.

She asked him how he was. If he was all right, if they were looking after him in the sheltered housing, but he didn’t seem to be listening. ‘I won’t come down,’ he said, although she hadn’t asked. ‘I’m too old.’ Then, ‘What about his mother?’

‘She won’t understand, will she?’ said Fran, as gently as she could. ‘Perhaps it’s better not.’ He grunted, which she took as agreement. She told him she’d tell him how things progressed, but he was dismissive, as though it was of no further interest to him.

‘I’m tired now,’ he snapped, eventually, and then hung up before she could say anything.

She lifted Ben from the bouncer and pressed her face against his temple, breathing in the smell of his warm skin.

She looked at the messages on her phone. One from Karen from yesterday, asking if she was all right. One from the headmistress of the primary school, this morning, asking if Emme was all right. A reminder about a dental appointment. A missed call, from a number the phone didn’t recognise. Fran stared at it a moment, then carefully she set the mobile back down on the bedside table to continue charging.

She thought about opening the drawer in the little table but told herself not to: she didn’t want to go down there crying, or worse.

They were waiting for her in the kitchen, leaning against the side. There was no sign of the latex gloves.

‘All right?’ said Gerard. ‘You spoke to the father?’ She nodded, Ben across her shoulder. She didn’t sit down.

‘What do you think’s happened to his hard drive?’ she asked but he just made a dismissive gesture with his hand.

‘I’ll get to that,’ he said.

‘It matters to me, if someone came into my house. If someone was in my house.’ The thought hammered. While she was upstairs.

‘I understand,’ he said, and his voice took on that soothing note. It made her angry. ‘It’s why we’ve given you the panic button, we’ve done the print sweep, it’s troubling, you’re right. It’s a vital line of inquiry. But if I’m honest…’ and he fixed her, making her look at him, his pale eyes, the bit of stubble on his chin, ‘it’s confusing. We don’t know when the hard drive went. It’s not something a burglar takes.’ A glance up at Carswell. ‘He could have removed it himself.’

‘Why would he do that?’ She felt her mouth set, stubbornly enraged at his patient tone. ‘All those times he said he was at the pub. Where was he going?’

Gerard looked at her a long moment, then he sighed. ‘There are reasons for men disappearing of an evening, some of them are innocent, some of them not so innocent.’ Carswell made a schoolboy sound under his breath and Gerard gave him a sharp look. ‘Are you sure you had no idea, no inkling, that … something was going on?’

‘Something?’ she spoke sharply. ‘What was going on?’ And his face went bland, smooth.

‘Oh, we don’t know that yet, do we,’ he said, and it came home to her that although Doug Gerard was a policeman, that didn’t mean he felt obliged to tell her the truth; what was it they said,
the whole truth, nothing but the truth
. ‘We’ll find out, though,’ he told her. ‘Don’t worry, Fran, we’ll find out.’

And when he set his head to one side, looking at her mildly, she thought, with a shock, He looks like Nathan when he does that.

‘You didn’t seem to want to know much about your husband, if you don’t mind my saying so, Fran.’ Gently. ‘Am I right?’

She took a deep breath. ‘I need to get the children to bed now,’ she said, surprised by how firmly she spoke. Something to do with that look that made her think of Nathan and something to do with Nathan’s father: knowing she never had to talk to him again. ‘I need to get things straight, in here.’

There was a silence then, that grew, and then Fran took the three, four steps to the door, her hand on the latch. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You’ve been … it’s been…’

‘A long day,’ said Gerard, soothing. ‘Yes, sure. Of course.’

But for a long moment he just stood there – and then she had to step aside because suddenly they were on the move, they were going, first Gerard – the faint lingering smell of his aftershave, his solid bulk, taking his time – then Carswell, hunching his narrow shoulders, touching his hand to his forehead in a salute, zipping his bomber against the cold.

She closed the door behind them and set her back against it.

Upstairs Emme had fallen asleep on the floor of her room, curled around like a dormouse in pillows and cushions she’d pulled down off the bed, at the centre of the mysterious project she had been working on with Harry. Teetering, fantastical, it was a cross between an igloo and a fortress and a beaver’s dam, bits of different construction kits, plastic and wood, turrets and drawbridges, more wall than interior as if the two of them had sat inside and built it around them, layer on layer.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Nathan had been alive. They had survived twenty-four hours.

The ridge ahead as she trudged in the darkness wasn’t a hill, more like a wall, it was some kind of old earthwork, Saxon or whatever. Ali had learned about it in primary school, forty years ago. There weren’t any hills here. She walked steadily, her hands in the pockets of the waxed jacket that had been her dad’s.

There was someone up ahead, in the undergrowth that ran along the top of the hill, a rustling. Ali kept walking. The rustle was low down, and when the dog heard her coming it began to bark. She followed the sound, making her way up, she could hear her own laboured breathing. Not as fit as she’d once been, hundred-metre sprinter when she was sixteen, a brief couple of years of beating all-comers. That clean feeling. A walk was better than nothing, every night she could she slipped out of the back door. Fresh air. Jesus, it was cold though.

‘Derek,’ she said. ‘Bit late for you, isn’t it?’ Derek Butt whistled and the dog was there, panting somewhere at their feet in the dark, pushing warm against her leg. She’d get a dog too, given a free choice.

Out of uniform Derek Butt always seemed smaller, the colour washed out of him. Just a little gingery bloke. A decent little gingery bloke. Ali could smell the fags, it was why he was always the one took the dog out, his wife wouldn’t let him smoke in the house. ‘All right?’ he said.

She sighed. ‘You know. A bit uphill just now.’

‘Your mum, is it?’ She didn’t know how Derek knew, except that they all knew, Mum lost by the railway line, Mum at the bus stop in her slippers.

‘It’s always Mum,’ she said, stuffing her hands further down in her pockets. ‘And the rest.’

‘Doug Gerard sympathetic, is he?’ said Derek Butt.

She snorted. ‘Doug Gerard wouldn’t know sympathy if it gave him a lap dance,’ she said. ‘It’s fine.’

Doug Gerard had appeared at her back door with a box of chocolates. ‘For your mum,’ he said, grinning, and she didn’t know what he was playing at. Something. He’d watched her from the kitchen door, putting the box away carefully. ‘We like to keep you sweet,’ he said. ‘Take more than that,’ she told him, moving to close the door, but there was his hand high up on the door jamb, fancied himself as Steve McQueen, standing like that in her doorway like no one could resist him. ‘We’ll get her,’ he’d said softly, then. ‘With or without you, DC Compton.’

The dog ran off again and Derek sighed. ‘He thinks she did it,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Ali. No other reason for taking her down to interview room four and they both knew it. With a kid. A babe in arms. She’d watched Gerard opening the rear door of the vehicle for Fran Hall, acting like her knight in shining bloody armour. ‘He seems to think it being her knife clinches it.’ She set her lips in a line. ‘I don’t know if the DI’s letting him have his head with that. Craddock. Have you heard?’

‘Doug Gerard’s ambitious,’ he said. ‘That goes a long way, as things stand. You push hard enough, you get what you want.’

‘That where we went wrong, then, Derek?’ Doug Gerard with his modern flat overlooking the river, she’d seen him showing the pictures on his mobile. Balcony. Loft-style. Master bedroom, all that, just waiting for the next bird to fall for his serious look. And there was Derek smoking in the back garden of his semi, and her listening for Mum in the night.

‘You think she did it?’ asked Derek, jamming his hands down in his pockets and she could hear him feeling for the fag packet, deciding against it.

‘No,’ she said, before she knew what was going to come out of her mouth. ‘There’s something though. In her eyes, that look they get. Scared.’

‘Her husband’s just been offed.’

Could you expect a bloke to understand it? Some did: Derek probably would, if he’d spend any time with Fran Hall, he was a kind man. He tried. ‘Yes,’ she said, patiently. ‘I get that, yeah, she’s scared shitless, though I don’t think Gerard cares, he tells himself she’s just scared shitless of being put away. It’s something underneath it. She’s waiting to be told she’s done something wrong. A dog that’s been hit too many times.’

‘He hit her?’

She shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. Doesn’t have to be, does it? Just control. Let’s say, I’d like to talk to someone about what that marriage was really like.’

‘He’s got Sadie on to it,’ Derek told her, and he turned looking for the dog, restless. ‘See what she got up to. He reckons that’s a woman’s job, you know. Gossip, friends. Someone’s got to have seen her, if she was up to something.’

DC Sadie Watts, little Sadie just out of college and itching with dissatisfaction every time Gerard chose Carswell over her. Ali had walked past her at her desk, sitting there mutinous at the computer, a fleece zipped up to her ears so Gerard couldn’t look at her boobs. Been there, done that.

‘Up to what, exactly?’ she said, as if she didn’t know, they thought they were all at it, didn’t they? Shagging around. Derek shifted, uneasy. ‘I want to know about him,’ Ali said. ‘Before I want to know about her. I want to know about Nathan Hall.’

‘You’ll have to fight Gerard for that one,’ said Derek, and he whistled into the darkness for the dog. ‘You know that, don’t you? He wants the glory.’ The dog was there, jumping up, and Derek lowered his face towards the animal, eyes shut as it tried to lick him, smiling in spite of himself.

Sadie Watts wanted the glory too, come to that, sticking her nose in, stamping her foot at being left out.

Ali stood there on the ridge a long time after he’d gone, in the cold. The big black fields laid out in front of her, lights here and there. There was a kitchen waiting for her, a dishwasher to be unloaded. There was Mum upstairs, spark out on her medication. She turned, measuring distances, looking for landmarks. The red eyes of the wind generators, Oakenham, the straight gleam off the big ditch that was Cold Fen, that would lead all the way to Fran Hall’s house, five miles off and out of sight.

Somewhere out there a couple more kids without a father, and Fran Hall all there was between them and chaos. And they want glory, she thought.

It rang, somewhere far off in the dark house.

The sound wove through the corridors, it ran up the stairs, it pulled her through an awful tangle of dreams: a face at a window, bony hands reaching in. And she was upright, in the bed, she was turning to look for the red numerals on the alarm clock, and all the time in the dark the pattering question,
Was it happening all over again?

Fran stumbled out of bed and to the door, groping in the dark, a hand to either side on the stairwell, following the sound down through the house to the telephone that hung on the wall just inside the kitchen door. She grabbed for the receiver.

‘Hello?’ Her own voice echoed down the line, her own blood pounding in her ears.

In her head she saw blood smeared on the wall, the black glass of a window and she swung back, out of the kitchen and into the hall, she pressed herself against the wall. All around them, around the house that sat up too tall, too visible in the vast flat plain, she felt the dark thicken and gather itself, not empty, not empty at all, it was whispering to her, down the line. And then there was a tiny gentle sound, a soft click, and the line was dead.