The Loving Husband (36 page)

Was Ali on her side? She’d seen the way she looked at Gerard, she knew his game. But they were colleagues. It was a closed system. Ben wriggled, struggled against her and for the tiniest flash of a second she understood those women who put everyone in the car and drove it into a reservoir. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought that that was where Rob was, down under the black water somewhere with his tidy car parked in the woods.

Ben’s suck slowed, he pulled back and gazed up at her.

Emme was quiet by her side. Quickly, she dialled: it went straight to answerphone.

Was he in bed, was he asleep? Did he have a woman, a girlfriend, or some kind of casual thing going on? She hung up. The tan tights in the field had held the DNA of a woman with convictions for soliciting. She tapped in a message.
4pm Angel?
She still hadn’t put Nick’s number in her address book, but she didn’t need to. Send. Delete. But before she could set the phone down again it rang. Her heart pounding, she answered.

It was Karen.

‘This bloody weather,’ she launched, without preamble. ‘Harry giving me grief because there’s no bloody snow, can you believe it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I tell him, it’ll come soon enough, you’ll be sick of it then, it’s slush and dirt and wet socks.’ Fran thought of the neatness and order in Karen’s bungalow, the carpet in the dim hall where photographs hung. ‘Last time a truck jackknifed on the ring road, five dead, people stuck in their cars twelve hours.’ Karen stopped, drew breath. ‘What? What’s happened? Don’t tell me they’ve collared someone, that pair of jokers? Wonders will never cease.’

‘Hold on,’ Fran said, laying the phone down carefully. ‘Emme,’ she said cautiously, ‘would you go downstairs and see if you can find the…’ she racked her brains. ‘Your snowboots?’ Emme gazed, trusting. ‘They might be in that cupboard under the stairs.’ Obedient, unquestioning – soon she’d start to question, Fran knew that – Emme slid off the bed and when Fran heard her careful footsteps on the stairs she picked up the phone again.

‘I was going to say, let’s get out for a walk,’ said Karen, wary.

‘It’s not that…’ Fran hesitated. ‘Gerard was over last night. They know something but they won’t tell me. They seem to think … there’s this guy. Someone I knew a long time ago.’

‘Coincidence and a half,’ was all Karen said, drily, when Fran finished. There was a silence. ‘How about I come over for that walk, then?’ Karen said finally. ‘Give the kids a run.’

They were out of the village toward Oakenham and had taken a path down by the bridge that turned into a towpath, Fran walking gingerly on her bandaged foot, the children running on ahead in long frosted grass, before Karen spoke. ‘Did he follow you out here, then, or you follow him? This Nick.’ The fen ran beside them, dead straight into the mist.

Coming to a halt Fran thrust her hands down into her pockets: she felt something there. ‘He was already here. I didn’t follow him. I would have crossed the road to avoid him for years after it ended.’ She felt Karen’s eyes on her. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, stubborn. ‘I never talked about Nick. Nathan didn’t know him from Adam.’ And then it came back to her, she and Nathan walking past one of Nick’s boarded up clubs and him asking her, did she miss the excitement.

‘Doesn’t mean he didn’t want to know,’ said Karen, brusque. ‘Quiet type, your Nathan, was he, right? But liked things the way he liked them, right? I mean, I didn’t need to meet him to know that, the way you are.’

Fran stared. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Stories my dad used to come out with, Mum used to tell him to shut up in front of us,’ Karen went on. ‘Nice quiet blokes that wouldn’t say boo to a goose, get the wife followed and first the police know about it is when the suitcase the husband put the body in gets caught in a fen sluice, five years later.’

Something caught, snagged on Fran’s train of thought, then. She took her hand out of her pocket and opened it for Karen to see.
Busty Blonde
. A woman in a blonde wig, with her boobs in both hands, thrust up and out.
Call Roxie
, and a number. She thought of the farmer with his stiff dyed hair and eyes going in different directions, knowing it was up there.

Up ahead the children were barely visible in the mist, running in circles in the long grass.

‘I found this,’ she said. ‘When I went up into the attic last night after the rats. I found, I found … underwear and all sorts. Leather.’ Karen took the card, snorted, then she gave it back.

‘So John Martin had to pay for it? Front page news. He wouldn’t be the only miserable bastard round here.’

‘They were married,’ said Fran and Karen shrugged as if to say,
same difference
. Was that what marriage was? An exchange of goods and services. If only she knew what Nathan had wanted out of theirs: too late now.

‘Everyone knew Jilly-Ann Martin – had history,’ said Karen. ‘It’ll have been how he met her. John Martin’s not much of a catch.’

‘Why did she leave the stuff behind?’ said Fran, stubbornly. ‘And her dog. The pig farmer, Dearborn said he got her a dog, she loved the dog, Martin had it put down after she went.’

Karen sighed. ‘Christ knows. Maybe she just wanted out, quick. Maybe she had a better offer.’ She raised her head, questing. ‘Harry? Harry?’ A fierce bark. ‘Wait, please.’

‘You don’t think he would have … done something to his wife then?’ Fran said as the two small figures materialised at a fence ahead, and Karen shrugged.

‘I’m saying, people move on. People like her. People like me, if you like. We don’t all have somewhere safe to go back to.’

‘That’s me, too, come to that,’ said Fran, thinking of her mum, pottering around each new bedsit, hanging stuff up, putting pans away. ‘That house is all we’ve got. Me and Emme and Ben.’

Karen wasn’t listening though, she was far away.

‘Have you heard of Black Barn?’ Fran said, quiet.

Karen’s head turned, quick. ‘That place?’ she said, and she was pale, suddenly. ‘You couldn’t be a kid around here back then and not hear about it.’ She sat forward. ‘That was the place? Your Nathan, he was one of
them
?’

‘One of who?’ said Fran, but Karen just shook her head.

‘Mum told us, don’t go near ’em. Said she’d have the hide off us if she caught us there. Never mind me dad, Christ knows what he’d have done.’ Along the fence a big shaggy horse, like a mythical beast out of the fog, had laid its nose on the wire. Holding back, they let the children go along towards it.

‘And the police knew … what was going on there?’

Karen turned her head sideways and rested it there, looking at Fran. ‘A while after … after they’d closed Black Barn down, some old mate of my dad’s from the force, not a bad guy, wanted to make an honest woman of Mum but she would have none of it. Anyway, he got pissed and said, someone high up in a neighbouring force had been moved sideways pretty quick after Black Barn, moved right under the radar. For being involved. For being a regular visitor.’

‘Are you talking about a senior policeman? What went on there, exactly?’ Feeling her throat close.

‘What kids get up to, I suppose,’ said Karen, and her eyes slid away. ‘Drinking, eating takeaway. Shagging whoever turned up.’ She shook her head, staring through the windscreen. ‘We imagined all sorts, didn’t we?’ Her voice sounded far off. ‘Drugs.’

‘Another one of them turned up last night, it’s why Gerard came round. Nathan’s friend Bez, the one I’ve never met. I was up in the attic after you left and when I came down he was at my kitchen door.’

‘Oh yeah, pissed, was he?’

‘You know him?’

‘Everyone knows him. Everyone’s tripped over him sleeping it off in a ditch at least once.’ Karen looked around, as if he might be somewhere out there in the freezing fog, in the long grass crunching underfoot. ‘One day he won’t be sleeping it off but…’ she shrugged, ‘there’ll be no one left who cares. That’s drunks for you.’

‘The police don’t seem that interested.’

‘Well, they’re lazy sods, aren’t they?’ He’s not going to run very far, is he?’ She set her mouth. ‘Do you think he did it? My money’d be on this ex of yours over Martin Beston any day.’

And then like a sign from her pocket her phone pinged: a message. But it wasn’t from Nick. Karen turned sharply. ‘Who’s that?’ she said, and Fran frowned down at the message.

‘My sister-in-law,’ and Karen’s eyes widened. ‘Nathan’s sister, Miranda,’ said Fran. ‘DS Gerard says she’s on her way from the airport.’

‘Better get home then,’ said Karen, and she was lifting a padded arm to the children and Harry already head down to her summons, even before she shouted, ‘Oi!’ The horse shied a little at the sound, steam coming out of its nostrils. ‘Don’t want to slow you down.’

They marched the children ahead of them, Karen surprisingly quick on her feet for a big woman. It occurred to her that Karen was already suspicious of Miranda.

There was no one there when they got back to the house but Karen stopped abruptly.

‘What is it?’ Fran said, Ben sweaty against her front with the speed of their pace and somehow jolted into sleep. Karen was standing there at the back of the car, a funny look on her face, and Fran came round her to see. Big words had been written in the fine crusted dusting of snow on the rear window. Where she’d seen YOU in the supermarket car park, now it was all there: BABY IT’S YOU.

All she could think was, at least I’ve got a witness. I could tell Karen everything, all of it. She’d understand.

The snow had been falling through the mist in the yard, big soft flakes invisible against the white of the sky, they fell almost like the first leaves of autumn, one coming loose here and there and drifting aimless, harmless to the ground.

Karen followed her, through the kitchen where she set Ben down in his car seat, up the stairs, hardly breathing. She was barely aware of where Harry and Emme had got to, but she heard the television come on in the sitting room. Light-headed suddenly, she turned around only when she got to the bedroom, suddenly aware of the silence but Karen had followed her after all, there she was, standing in the bedroom door.

‘Here,’ Fran said, struggling with the drawer to show Karen the card where the words came from, and then abruptly it opened.

Karen folded her arms, a guarded expression on her face.

‘It was there,’ Fran told her. ‘It was there.’ And for a second, as the only explanation that came to her was that he’d been back for it, he’d been inside the house while she was out, God knew how, she felt the room turn black at the edges and she had to sit. As she focused on breathing she sensed Karen there, standing on the periphery of her vision, but for a second she couldn’t be sure who the figure was. And then she saw a scattering of fine white powder and she remembered: Carswell and Gerard had been in here, dusting for prints. They had taken it.

Then she did look up, to tell her, and Karen said of course it was before turning into the corridor at the sound of a car pulling up outside. The slam of a door and two voices, one of them a woman’s.

From the spare room window they saw her, paying a taxi driver, his head bobbing in receipt of a tip. A small, stocky woman, dark-haired with a black nylon suitcase on the grass beside her. The taxi driver said something, pointed up at the sky, then he was back in his cab and pulling away, and Miranda Hall, turning, looked up at the house.

Karen had already gone, and Fran could hear her heading downstairs. Alone at the window she waved to Miranda and pointed round the side of the house and saw her nod. Fran went after Karen.

‘The police’ll tell you,’ she said, breathless, at the foot of the stairs, the dark hall behind her, the big panelled and beaded front door that hadn’t opened all the time they’d lived here, trapping them in the dingy back quarters. ‘The card was there. That’s what it said. “Baby It’s You”
.
’

‘Harry,’ Karen called sharply from where she stood, her hand already on the back door. Ben was on the floor between them sitting wide-eyed in his car seat, alert to the presences in the room.

‘Something’s messing with your head,’ said Karen, stiff. ‘Something or someone.’ Her hand was on the doorknob. ‘
Harry!
’

‘I should have known it wasn’t Nathan,’ Fran said. Somehow Karen had to understand, she wasn’t nuts. Karen was important. ‘Five years and he never once got me a Valentine. Not that I cared,’ she went on hurriedly, ‘not that that sort of thing—’

‘Yeah right,’ Karen said, tough. ‘Just don’t let anyone mess with you. Not Doug Gerard, not whoever’s writing shit on your car. Tell the police, get it down, get it all out there. Words is all it is. A ninety-nine pence card, in a drawer.’ And then there was the sound of feet on the gravel and the door opened, and Nathan’s sister was there.

‘You must be Fran,’ Miranda said, unerring, hauling her suitcase over the threshold and holding a hand out to her. She didn’t look like Nathan, she was more solid, she gave out something steadier than the jumpy restless energy he’d had even when he was sitting down. She had the same fringe as in the old family photograph and Fran saw the picture in her head: Miranda on one end of the see-saw, chubby and fierce, wiry Nathan on the other, a malicious gleam in his eye as if about to jump off.

Behind them inside the house Emme and Harry had appeared in the dim corridor. Emme stared; Harry threaded his way between them to his mother, his little bullet head unerring. Miranda fixed on Emme. ‘Emme,’ she said. ‘Is that right?’ Emme nodded slowly, her lower lip caught between her teeth.

‘I’m out of here,’ said Karen, ushering Harry ahead of her out of the door.

‘This is Karen,’ said Fran, quickly. ‘She’s been, she’s been … I don’t know what I could have done without her.’ Miranda looked at Karen, cool, nodded.

‘Gimme a call,’ Karen told her, and she was gone, and Miranda was turning in the kitchen, scrutinising. She wore a suit, expensive, but crumpled with travel: she brought a different world into the room.

‘Christ,’ she said, stopping to look back out of the door and beyond the shed to the thin trees on the horizon, the low grey sky. ‘It’s good to be reminded why you left a place. The taxi driver said I’d been lucky to get here before the snow.’ And as she peered out, a big stray flake drifted down in the grey yard. ‘I’m not so sure.’ And closing the door, although until then she’d shown no sign of registering his presence, unhesitatingly Miranda turned and knelt beside Ben, her small hands moving to unfasten him. ‘And this must be Ben.’ He gazed at her, wondering. Emme edged into the light, gazing.