The Loving Husband (28 page)

‘No,’ said Jo firmly, and there was a muffled sound, then she was back, and a door closed. ‘It … we’re not eating for a bit anyway.’ And she sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I shouldn’t have just blurted it out like that. I should have said something years ago or not at all.’

‘No,’ said Fran, staying level and calm. ‘I’m glad you told me. You could even be right.’ Jo was silent: what happens, Fran wondered, when I tell her? If.
I was … it was
… there was a man in my bed.
She cleared her throat, but it wouldn’t come out. ‘It’s just that it seems … too easy. My husband doesn’t fancy me, so he must be gay?’

There was a silence, that lasted long enough for her to hear something outside, a steady wind, a soft pattering in trees somewhere far off.

‘So why did he marry me? This isn’t the nineteen fifties. We know why I did it, I wanted the baby, I assumed if he wanted it too marriage was what came next. Stupid maybe, lazy maybe, cowardly, but why him? Why did he come after me and marry me, why did we have two kids?’ Jo didn’t say anything, so she thrashed on. ‘Why did he want to move back out to the sticks with me, if he had an awful time here, if it was what fucked him up?’

Her voice dropped, almost inaudible. ‘Do you think Nathan knew, Jo? Did you tell him, about that guy? The one-night … the—’

‘No,’ hissed Jo, ‘of course I didn’t tell him, what do you take me for?’

‘Did you know his name?’ whispered Fran. ‘The … the guy. His name, where he works, that stuff.’ She felt a flush up her neck, and she gabbled, ‘But when this happened. Do you know what I thought? Just for a second. He’s come after me. The guy.’

‘That loser?’ Jo scoffed. ‘No. He…’

The hair rose on Fran’s scalp, her skin crawled with shame, thinking of the long staircase and the man’s back, she dreaded being even told his name and tried to escape, to forestall. ‘No, don’t, I don’t want to know anything. Don’t tell me his name.’

‘He’s been working on the other side of the world for almost a year,’ said Jo. The relief that flooded Fran’s system was only momentary, because Jo was pushing still. ‘So you never found out why, what it was all about? Why Nathan was so keen on going back to the sticks? Excited, you said.’

‘No,’ Fran whispered. ‘I mean … it didn’t come to anything, no big jobs materialised, it turns out his office was…’ and she trailed off under a sudden sense of shame. ‘Not much more than a … a shed.’ A box on a light industrial estate.

Where had that excitement come from? What had it been about? What had he come back here for?

There was a silence, then Jo cleared her throat. ‘I saw your press conference,’ she said, hesitant. ‘It’s up on some crime website.’

‘It is?’ Fran felt cold.

And then, on cue, Jo said, ‘What did happen that night, Fran? Because you’re still not telling me it all, are you?’ Beyond the windscreen in the dark something whirled and hung as fine as dust, it barely speckled the glass. ‘You looked so frightened.’

‘Oh, Jo,’ she said. ‘I wish … I wish … I wish you were here.’ And quickly, before she lost it, ‘I’ll call you.’ And she hung up.

When she looked down at the screen, she saw it as if from high overhead, a tiny blue rectangle of light in all the wide flat darkness.
Three messages
, it said.
Missed call.
Doug Gerard.

He was there when she hurried back out to lock the car, standing beside a battered Range Rover with no glass in the back windscreen, his cap in his hands. She felt her heart race until she recognised him. Emme cleaning her teeth upstairs, half asleep. Ben in his car seat on her bed.

There had been a terse answerphone message from Doug Gerard. ‘You haven’t been answering your phone. You’ll be…’ and there was a heavy pause. ‘You’ll be glad to hear we’ve had an excellent response to the press conference. We’d like a word. It might be best…’ Another pause, then, with finality, ‘If you were to come back into the station tomorrow morning at nine thirty.’

It had been the cap in his hands that had identified Fred Dearborn. ‘What is it?’ Fran said, weary to the point of despair, adrenalin beginning to battle it. They were alone inside. The back door unlocked.

‘The wife sent me,’ he said, and from his reluctance she believed him. ‘Make sure you was all right.’

‘I’m all right,’ said Fran dully. She pressed the locking device on her key and the car’s lights pulsed, the locks setting with a clunk. ‘I don’t need casseroles, Mr Dearborn. It’s as much as I can do to get a bit of toast down, and the kids … I mean, thank you.’

‘Don’t matter,’ the farmer said, gruff. ‘I never meant to…’ and he stepped back from her, reaching down for his car door.

Fran put a hand to her forehead – it wasn’t as if she had help to spare at the moment, never mind friends.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s very kind of your wife. Look … the baby’s … I can’t…’ She gave up. ‘Why don’t you come in a minute?’ She heard his footsteps behind her in the gravel. Mental, she thought, what made her think she had any instinct for who was safe? No wonder they all thought she was crazy, or guilty. Fuck the lot of them. He ducked his head to get under the lintel.

‘Milk two sugars,’ Dearborn said obediently when she asked and she spooned it in, stirred, handing it to him then went to the foot of the stairs to listen, but there was no sound. She came back and folded her arms across her body, watching him peer at the tea. He had bushy greying eyebrows that moved as he sipped, gingerly.

‘Did you ever find anywhere for your pigs?’ she asked, abrupt, and he raised his big head in surprise.

‘Matter of fact I did,’ he said. ‘Twenty-acre field other side of Oakenham. Funny enough it’s old Martin’s, could’ve knocked me down with a feather when he come up to me—’

‘John Martin? The … the man who lived here?’ She shook her head stubbornly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. He said he was going to the seaside.’ Agitated, she crossed to the sink, sweeping the dirty breakfast things into it, turning on the tap. Suddenly the room looked a shambles, she saw spilled milk, a ring where a mug had stood. She picked up a cloth.

‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ said Dearborn watching her ruminatively. ‘I see him at an agricultural auction up to Chatteris a month ago, he were just looking, he said, but it en’t the seaside, is it? Not Chatteris.’ He shook his head slowly, wondering. ‘Funny one and no mistake. Twenty year he’s refused to talk to me. Must have been getting shot of this place. Two year on the market and no one wanted it, not even his wife, she upped and gone, packed her bags one night and he turned into a whassit,
recluse
.’ He pronounced the word as if it was foreign. ‘Newspaper up at the windows. Estate agents had to send someone in to clean the place up in the end, make it look normal. Not that it was much better when she was around. Not that kind of female, she weren’t.’ And he came to a halt, as if surprised at the length of his own speech.

‘Where did she go?’ Fran asked, the cloth in her hands, because it had snagged somewhere,
packed her bags one night.
The missing wife.
‘Ahh, I dunno,’ said Dearborn, setting down his cup, not unkind. ‘Back to the pikeys, no doubt, back where she come from, when she found out there weren’t no money in it.’ He spoke without animus. ‘She did talk about the seaside to my missus, once, Yarmouth it was. Mebbe he was planning on going after her.’ He laughed, puzzled.

‘No one ever saw her again?’ Fran heard herself, quick and breathless, and slowly he shook his head again.

‘Just gone,’ he said. ‘But…’ He frowned. ‘You don’t want to … she weren’t your sort. You know where he found her? Internet. Went into the library and used them computers, chatroom, next thing you know she’s getting out an Oakenham taxi in high-heeled shoes, three suitcases in the back.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I better be off,’ he said, rubbing at a watch on his wrist: it felt like two in the morning but she could see that it wasn’t much after nine. ‘Leave you to it, with them kids. Mine’s grown now but … well. Dunno how she’d’a managed on ’er own, need eyes in the back of yer head, kiddies.’

‘Are you saying … she was like a mail-order sort of…’ It caught in her throat.

‘One word for it,’ he said shortly, uneasy. His hand was on the door, his head already lowered for the cap. ‘They was married, I believe. But it weren’t for love, not on her side.’

‘I
would
like a dog,’ she said abruptly and he stopped, turning in surprise.

‘Right then,’ he said, ‘I’ll look out for one. Mebbe a collie? Bit lively.’ His face clouded. ‘
She
had a collie cross,’ he said.

‘She?’

‘Soft on that dog, Martin’s woman. Jilly-Ann.’ Finally retrieving her name. ‘Never took it with ’er, though. Tret it like it were her very own baby but never took it when she went.’ And he was ducking through the door. ‘Couldn’t make sense of that. He had it put down.’ He tipped his hat. ‘I’ll let you know. Get a puppy for you. Golden retriever’s a gentle dog.’

Upstairs Emme lay asleep and fully clothed on the bed. By the time Fran had undressed her and settled her back under the covers she could hear Ben stirring in the car seat, protesting against confinement and a nappy that had soaked through to the seat’s lining. She changed him and lay beside him on her bed, because she didn’t want to be alone.

Not alone and thinking about a woman who climbed out of a taxi in front of her house in high-heeled shoes, a woman who disappeared one night and never came back. Jilly-Ann Martin. Where had she gone? Was she here somewhere, still, was there evidence of her? As she lay in the dark with Ben’s soft regular breath in her ear she saw again, or dreamed, DS Doug Gerard bending over a frosted furrow. He straightened up with his policeman’s pen held out, a pair of knotted tights, American tan, dangling from it and that expression as he turned his face towards her of amusement, or something like it. And in that half waking, half imagining state the figure on the field’s edge was John Martin, standing among the poplars, the keys to a house that had once been his, jingling in his pocket.

On the back doorstep Karen held the flowers out to her stiffly, Harry in her other hand in the cold yard.

She’d come to sit with Emme, so Fran could go to the police station.

‘It’s no problem,’ Karen had said gently when Fran rang her, and down the line Fran could hear the hush in her tidy bungalow. ‘I can stay as long as you like. Harry’s got football this afternoon and she can come and watch.’ A normal Saturday afternoon, kids on the sidelines in the frost. She had agreed, overwhelmed with gratitude.

Now Fran stared down at the cellophaned bunch, confused. ‘They were on the step,’ said Karen, peering past her into the kitchen. ‘All right if we come in?’

Roses. Cheap, already limp. Emme darted over and took them.

They were waiting for her outside the police station, a reception committee, and the first thing she did was to thrust the dripping bunch into Gerard’s hands. ‘I want them analysed,’ she said, red-faced, stiff, and taken by surprise he laughed. ‘I mean it,’ she said. ‘And that box of chocolates. Someone’s doing this.’ Impassive, he handed the wet cellophane to Carswell.

Ali Compton was the first one to step forward, taking hold of the baby seat, flashing a look at Gerard. ‘You don’t need to worry about this meeting, Fran,’ she said, ‘just keeping you up to date.’ She had shadows under her eyes.

Surrendering Ben, she unslung a bag from her shoulder, she’d packed it before they left. A change of clothes, rattle, nappies.

‘I can be in there with you too again, if you like,’ said Ali, taking the bag in her spare hand. ‘I just thought you might like … the concentration. The headspace, you know.’

She looked so weighed down now, like the plastic horse that flings stuff off if you pile on one thing too many. Fran realised that must be how she looked. Buckaroo.

‘No need to worry, like Ali says.’ Gerard’s hand was on her shoulder and she stiffened. Coming from him, it didn’t sound like reassurance. ‘We just need to go over a few things.’ He flicked a quick look at Ali, but not so quick she didn’t see the hostility in it.

It was raw and cold and the wind blew steadily between the cars. Carswell had the collar on a too-thin jacket turned up to his ears, his shoulders hunched, his face peaked and cold.

‘Maybe we should get on with it,’ she said, stepping out from under Gerard’s hand.

The room wasn’t what she’d expected, not the one they’d been in before. Two steps inside and she stopped, looking, the men coming to a halt behind her. It was painted cream, with a floral border at waist height, a coffee table with tissues, some low, padded seating. Maybe this time they wanted to soften her up.

She’d woken early, from a dream where everything was bathed in a golden light and she’d been listening to a man in a shower, she could see his outline through a glass door, she knew who he was but the name wouldn’t come to her. The light she woke to had been thin and grey, and the room had been cold. When she went downstairs the boiler had showed a red light.

‘A couple of things, then,’ said Gerard, one arm up on the back of the low seating, at ease. Carswell sat with his knees apart and his elbows on them, still jiggling, like a schoolboy footballer. His notebook was on the table. She set her mobile down beside it.

She’d knelt to explain to Emme, gazing into her face. ‘I’ve got to go and talk to the … policemen. About Daddy’s accident.’

‘I don’t want to go to Karen’s house,’ she said.

‘Karen is going to bring Harry over,’ she said quickly. ‘I know it’s not much fun to stay inside but…’ She stopped, remembering Emme’s Saturdays with Nathan. ‘And we’ll talk about what happens next week. About school.’

‘I’ll be OK, Mummy,’ she said, pale. ‘Daddy never came with me to school, did he?’

Fran had knelt beside her. ‘It’s all right if it hurts, Emme. It’s all right to want to be at home with me and Ben.’

Emme shook her head stiffly. ‘He won’t come back, will he?’ she said, frowning.

‘Who?’ said Fran, her breath constricted.

‘Daddy won’t come back.’ Emme’s small face was pinched and serious. ‘He was mean to you sometimes,’ she said, and Fran sat back, shaking her head.