The Loving Husband (41 page)

She lifted the folder to the light, the cardboard was soft with age. Plus she hadn’t wanted it in the house, in Mum’s house.

There was a two-page report on the girl’s death. Accidental overdose, heroin plus alcohol. Interviews with Martin Beston and Robert Webster; Webster the one who called an ambulance, Beston was found unconscious in another room, had his stomach pumped. No mention of Alan Nathan Hall. Psych reports, social services reports, on Beston and Webster, no more than perfunctory, just reading them made Ali feel something hard as a stone in her gut. No one cared where they’d gone next, whether they scrambled out like Rob Webster, or lay there battered and bleeding, like Martin Beston.

It’s better now, she told herself. We do more for them now. But now was too late.

She turned the page, almost at the end, and there, barely even a footnote, was a photograph of the family of the dead girl, arriving at the inquest.

When the mobile rang, she assumed it would be him, Nick. She was standing in the cavernous hall, just beginning in the half-dark to make out the space. It stank. Not river water, not mould or damp, dead leaves in corners: it stank of human waste and rotten food.

It was Doug Gerard.

‘I called the house,’ he said, his voice cold. ‘Where are you? Is Ali Compton there? Christ knows what she’s playing at, chasing us round the country. There’s been a development. More than one.’

‘Is it Nick?’ she said, and when she heard his hard laugh she regretted it.

‘“Is it Nick?”’ he mocked. ‘We’ll come to Nick Jason in due course.’ The line jumped and cut out. She held the phone away from her and saw the tiny icon that told her how much battery she had left was nothing but a sliver of red. In the silence she heard something, through the arched window, the sound of a car in the lane behind the house.

Then Gerard’s voice crackled back at her and she put it back to her ear. ‘I’m at Black Barn,’ she said, ‘I’m meeting—’ But he cut out again.

‘What?’ she said, covering her other ear with her hand. ‘What?’

Fran held the phone away from her but the screen was black.

The door opened. ‘Frankie,’ said Nick, and for a second she saw, through the door behind him, how white it was in the outside world and then he closed it.

The look on his face as he came inside: fear and disgust. Why had he brought her here?

‘Christ,’ said Nick. ‘That smell.’ Then his arms were around her, and it was his smell in her nostrils, his familiar smell. It must have been him – her body would have known a stranger, she would have rolled over in the bed, she would have woken and screamed and stopped him.

(And what would have happened then? her logical mind asked her, and then would he have killed you, the stranger?)

‘It’s all right,’ she said, and she felt him stiffen, wary. ‘What?’ he said and she shifted ground.

‘Why did you ask me here?’ she said. He stood back from her, holding her by the elbows.

‘You wanted to find this place, right? I found it for you. I thought we could…’ He faltered. ‘I don’t know. Look around, see if—’

‘They were after you, Nick,’ she said. ‘Those suitcases you bought me in Amsterdam. Were you bringing stuff into the country in them?’

He shook his head, uneasy. ‘It was a one-off, I was never … I didn’t deal, I didn’t buy the stuff. I was out of my depth.’

‘Liar,’ she said, holding her ground. ‘They don’t put undercover surveillance on someone for five years – five years, of my life, five years, two children – they don’t do that for nothing.’

He was pale, defeated. ‘I was a fucking idiot. You know me, Frankie. I just wanted the clubs, I didn’t know the drugs were going to … people were after me to let that happen. It got out of control.’ She said nothing. ‘Maybe they knew I would have done anything to get you back.’ She held his gaze, seeing how lost he’d been, without her. Then he looked away.

‘All right,’ he mumbled. ‘All right. I’m still in it. I’m still moving stuff, still selling. I’d stop in a second if you asked me, though. If you’d come back.’ Pleading; begging.

‘Did you kill Nathan, Nick?’ But before she’d finished the question she knew the answer, faltering, grappling, it must have been him, only him, in her bed. But it hadn’t been.

‘You’re crazy,’ he said, his voice falling away. ‘Kill a man? Knife him? I mean, you’re kidding, right?’ He put his face close to hers. ‘Frankie, please.’ She pulled away from him and pushed the door open, into the bedroom.

Not a bed, but more like the great nest of a filthy bird, occupying most of the floor, heaped and mounded layers, she saw tangled clothes, the ragged corner of a blanket. No one there: he was gone. She turned and there was Nick, his back to her. He was looking at something that had been pinned to the wall. A newspaper cutting. Standing, she saw,
Star Student Found Dead
, and beside it was a photograph. Two girls in school uniform.

And it tumbled down around her, falling from the sky. Nathan’s phone number in the list on her kitchen wall, where anyone could see it, where Karen could have seen it, noted it. Emme saying,
My auntie’s not dead,
my
auntie’s not dead.
Harry’s auntie
.
Nathan walking away from Julian Napier to talk to a woman on his phone, the night he died.

That look in Karen’s eyes.

She turned and ran, down the splintered wooden stairs in a big cold hallway where the light had once shone green, she ran for the door, and the wide dark outside.

Ali had got halfway to Chatteris when they bothered to send her a message, curt:
See you at the station. On our way back.

The dual carriageway had been clear. For once they’d got the gritting lorries out, Christ knows they’d had enough warning. Reports were coming in of chaos on the smaller roads, a tanker in a ditch somewhere.

She called, and got Carswell. The monkey not the organ grinder. ‘You wanna hear what’s going down now,’ he said, jittery and gleeful.

Ali cut him short. ‘Where are you? I mean, exactly?’

She waited in the lay-by, just above where they would turn off to get back to the station. Gerard climbed out, as pumped as a gorilla at being given instructions on where to meet, and when, his angry breath clouding as he came for her across the gravel and litter and used condoms dusted with snow.

She’d left most of the folder in the passenger seat. Would Sadie Watts take the fall for her nicking it? She couldn’t think about that. She had the photo with her, though. The dead girl’s mother, half her hair plastered over her face and hardly able to walk straight, a bleary look of misery at the photographer. A younger woman beside her, face set in wooden fury: the sister. Ali stepped in front of Gerard.

‘We’re going to Black Barn,’ he said. ‘You want to come and hold Fran Hall’s hand? Because that’s where she is. With her boyfriend.’

Holding her ground, Ali lifted the picture up to his face. ‘You recognise her?’ she said. ‘That’s the sister of the girl that overdosed at Black Barn. Seen her anywhere before?’

He stepped back in a hurry but Carswell came in past him, eager, wiping his nose then reaching for the picture. ‘
Never
,’ he breathed, up close. ‘Yeah, boss, look at that. Whassername, isn’t it? In her kitchen. That bossy cow, remember. That
bitch
.’ Trying to please him.

‘Karen Johns, as was,’ said Ali. ‘Karen Humphries these days, married, divorced, one kid who happens to be the best mate of Fran Hall’s daughter Emme.’

She could see the tendons in Gerard’s neck tighten as he took another threatening step.

‘You think Nathan Hall knew Karen Johns had befriended his wife? Was offering to help with his kids? You think she’d forgotten the man she held responsible for her sister’s death?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re all the same,’ she said. ‘You’re so busy trying to look the big man to the undercover guys that you can’t see what’s under your own nose.’

Behind them, hopping from foot to foot, Carswell said, ‘Tell her, boss. Tell her what we found up the reservoir.’

But Doug Gerard paid him no more attention than a fly. ‘Where did you get that?’ he said, and Ali knew if he could have killed her there and then he would have.

But in her hand the phone began to ring.

She was in the ditch.

Nick had offered to drive her, he’d begged. ‘You can’t go out there on your own, not in this.’ Then when she shook her head, stiff with revulsion, and shoved past him to the door he said, ‘Just take it then. Take the car, it’s got four-wheel drive, it’ll—’ she had snatched the key from him. It wasn’t until she turned off the main road that she realised she hadn’t given him her keys in exchange, he was stuck.

Fran pumped the accelerator but the wheels spun, the car began to rotate beyond her control. The rear end dropped and the whole thing slid backwards, down, and she was in the ditch. Gasping with panic she battered at the heavy door with her shoulder, at last it gave and she fell out, knee-deep in snow, soaked before she righted herself. She could see the poplars, perhaps half a mile ahead.

Under snow almost everything else had changed and her bearings were skewed, the light was almost gone, the fields gleamed pale and endless, criss-crossed with black. On the horizon the red eyes of the big wind generators, a mobile mast, too late, too far to help her. And she began to run, towards the line of trees.

It was nothing like running. With every step she sank, the snow sucked at her, it drenched her. Within yards she couldn’t feel her feet but under her clothes she sweated steadily. Don’t stop. Don’t fall. As she ran she scanned the vista, she tried to triangulate, but the line of the horizon see-sawed crazily with every dipping step. One more landmark was what she needed: where, where? Snowflakes filled the air, they whirled, landed cold on her face.

This was the road. It almost stopped her in her tracks.
This was the road, this was where he …
Not he, she. It made no sense: she couldn’t force sense out of it. The car parked under the poplars, the body in the ditch, those were her points of triangulation. Not Bez, because that afternoon, that warm, long-ago Saturday afternoon – when something had drawn her out to the barn, that humming in the night air and the car parked under the trees, watching her wander alone through the house – he had been lying face down, pissed into unconsciousness, in a kids’ playground. Not Bez, because it had been Karen.

Fran was at the poplars. Panting, she turned and looked across the field. Had that been Karen’s car, parked up in the warm afternoon? Had she sent Harry on a sleep-over so she could watch and wait? She could work out his routines and see that when light fell he would come out, expansive, proprietorial, lord of all he surveyed, to piss in a ditch. So that one day, when the time was right, she could come up to him in the dark and whisper in his ear,
I’ve waited twenty years for this
. The arrogance of him, coming back here. Fran held still, she focused. There was the dark formless shape of the barn and to one side, her house, in the dark. Their house. There was a light on in her bedroom, there was someone in the window, and as she saw it her heart rate accelerated, and she turned towards the lighted window and she ran.

‘She’s not here.’

On the mobile Doug Gerard sounded frightened, now, almost like he was asking for her help. ‘We haven’t got her.’ The phone wedged under her chin, carefully Ali indicated, pulling in to the lay-by. She was four miles from Cold Fen, and the road was treacherous, a layer of slush under her worn tyres.

‘It was Nick Jason she was meeting here,’ Gerard said, panting, the line crackling with interference. Behind him Ali could hear Carswell’s scouse whine, wheedling or accusing someone, you couldn’t tell which. Doug Gerard made a noise in his throat. ‘Jason said she’d gone back to her place,’ he said, fighting to sound like he was in charge. ‘She’d worked out who Karen Johns was and she went haring off after her in Jason’s car, left him high and dry.’

Not exactly the work of a criminal mastermind, lending your car to a bird, but all the chances to have a go passed before Ali’s eyes: there wasn’t time.

‘Is he telling the truth?’

Gerard’s reply was muttered. ‘I think so.’ Of course he was. It wasn’t Nick Jason who’d bought Fran Hall chocolates, it wasn’t her husband, it wasn’t John Martin, either. And it hadn’t been Martin Beston.

It had been almost an afterthought, back there in the lay-by with Gerard clenching his fists as he came down on her, Ali staring down at the mobile,
number unknown
, before killing the call. Carswell piping up, perhaps trying to avert violence, the right instinct for once, and it had worked, give him his due. Gerard had stopped, straightened up. ‘It wasn’t him in the reservoir,’ he said, and she had stared. ‘Not Robert Webster, after all. It was Martin Beston.’

And the phone in her hand had begun to ring again.

It had been Lindsay, from the shop on Oakenham high street that sold pink glass and Valentine’s crap. Yes, the girl had said, quite pleased with herself, she remembered the customer quite well, her cheerful certainty on the other end of the line in her safe little shop so at odds with the black lay-by and trucks hissing past through the slush and Carswell’s white little ferret face looking properly scared, at last.

‘Tall gentleman,’ Ali repeated, and Lindsay babbled on.

‘Slim,’ she said. ‘In an anorak, not the usual romantic type but you can never tell. Turned up on a mountain bike, would you believe, thirty pounds those chocolates cost.’

Ali had barely hung up before Gerard and Carswell had reached their own conclusions. ‘She was meeting someone at Black Barn,’ Gerard said, yanking at the car door. ‘Come on. Black Barn? Got to be him, hasn’t it?’

Shame you didn’t think of it earlier, Ali didn’t say, but all the time her own instincts taking her somewhere else. Those kids, that house. Family liaison. ‘I’m going to her place,’ she said, and they’d roared off, barely correcting a skid on the road surface like an ice rink now. One-track, one-note, one-way: Doug Gerard and Ed Carswell not capable of executing a U-turn if their lives depended on it. And now they were stuck out in Black Barn and she was still four miles from Cold Fen. She checked her mirrors, indicated.