It didn’t make sense, of course it didn’t. Why would Steve be the one to withdraw cash if David was there? She was still crying as Irene guided her out of the room. Steve stayed where he was.
‘Why don’t I phone Steph?’ Irene was asking. ‘You shouldn’t be on your own now.’
Jo wasn’t listening as she made her way downstairs and into the living room where Archie had been sleeping soundly throughout his mother’s latest histrionics. It was only when she began collecting up his belongings that she realized what Irene was suggesting. Her mother-in-law put her hand protectively on the bassinet. ‘You can’t possibly look after Archie while you’re this upset.’
‘I’m fine, Irene.’
‘Do you really believe that after what’s just happened? Please, Jo, you’re not ready.’
Irene’s gentle voice was hypnotic and before Jo knew what was happening, her mother-in-law had pulled Archie’s changing bag from Jo’s hand and guided her to the sofa. ‘I’ll make us a nice cuppa and then phone Steph. She can come and pick you up. I don’t think you should drive in your current state.’
Or look after a baby, Jo added silently. She had failed to keep her husband and now she was losing her son. She was lost. The answers to David’s disappearance eluded her like shadows in a lightless world. The police photograph had been a lone spark but now she wondered if she had only imagined it. While Irene disappeared to make the tea, Jo couldn’t bear to look at the baby so took one last look at the crumpled piece of paper she had continued to clutch in her hand. She could see only the man’s right arm, which was draped in deep shadow. No, something was wrong and she angrily wiped away the tears so she could focus on the coat sleeve. Was it really shadow or was it possible that the material had been blackened by some other means? A half-formed idea blazed across her mind and more lights flickered into life. Jo jumped up and stormed back upstairs.
‘It’s not David’s coat at all!’ she yelled, launching herself at her brother-in-law for the second time. Steve had been standing in the middle of his bedroom but once again found himself pinned against the wall. Jo wasn’t going to back down this time and thumped her fist against his chest before he had a chance to answer. ‘You were wearing my coat! You said you threw it on the fire but you kept it so you could impersonate your brother and take his money!’ The photo was balled up in her hand but she didn’t need to see the charring where the sleeve had caught fire and from the look on Steve’s face, neither did he.
‘Don’t, Jo,’ Steve begged.
For a split second, Jo wanted to listen to him. If Steve had used her coat then he hadn’t necessarily seen David. And if he had access to David’s account to withdraw cash that second time, then why not the first? Those two sightings were the only tangible pieces of evidence she had that David was alive and well. She didn’t want to do this because then she would have to face her worst fears – which by Jo’s standards, would be off the scale – but she could no longer run and hide. ‘You’ve been stealing off your own brother!’
‘No!’ Steve yelled back but he didn’t push Jo away. ‘I wouldn’t take anything from Dave without his permission! I probably deserve to be hated, but not for that Jo, not for that.’
Jo was glaring at him but for a second or two she said nothing. Her mind was sharper than it had been for months and the connections she made terrified her. ‘Sally told me about the bailiffs and about the house being repossessed,’ she said, surprisingly calm. ‘That doesn’t happen overnight, Steve. You must have been in arrears for a long time. How much did you owe? Did £3,000 keep your head above water a few months longer? Was it David who bailed you out before he went missing?’
‘Stop! For God’s sake stop! Isn’t it better to believe that he’s still out there?’
Steve tried to push her away which reignited Jo’s anger. ‘I want the truth!’ she screamed as she hit his chest again, determined to beat the confession out of him. She was within touching distance of knowing what happened if only she could hold her nerve and she had to: for her sake, for Archie and for her marriage. She wasn’t sure she was going to like the answers she would find but it had to be better than living with the questions.
‘I may be losing my mind but I’m not stupid, Steve! That was you in the photo. Did you already have David’s cash card so you could withdraw the money? Did he trust you with his pin number? Of course he did, you’re his brother! Why wouldn’t he be that foolish? Well I’m no fool and I don’t trust you,’ Jo snarled. ‘David gave you the £3,000 and once he wasn’t there to give you any more you took it – you took the rest all by yourself. It was you, all along.’ Jo’s voice was trembling with emotion that exposed a vulnerability that she didn’t want Steve to see. It made her all the angrier and she vented it with another blow to the chest that Steve didn’t even try to deflect. ‘I can’t believe you’ve stood by and let everyone think he was safe and well. You stopped the police searching for him, you let us all abandon him!’
Countless memories of David flooded Jo’s mind, ones she had replayed over and over again in search of hints of deceit and betrayal, but the one she clung to now was the one Sally had forced her to confront: the one of the man who had brought love, light and laughter to her world.
‘You let us all hate him!’ she cried, her words strangled and full of pain. ‘You made me believe—’ she broke off with a tortured gasp. ‘You made me believe that he was still out there, that he was watching me! You made me think he didn’t want Archie, and because of that I was prepared to push my child, my last link to David, away! How could you? How could you?’
‘Stop this, Jo. Please,’ he begged.
Jo shook her head. Despite knowing it was perhaps too little, too late, she was determined not to let David down now and her eyes darted across the room. Steve had been staying with his mum for over a month but he was still living out of the bin bags Sally had dumped on Irene’s doorstep. Jo presumed it was to fool his mother into thinking it was only a temporary arrangement. She shoved against Steve and flew towards the bags, tearing open the nearest one and scattering clothes across the room. Steve rugby tackled her.
‘Get off me!’ she screamed. Her fingers clawed through the second bag she had been trying to open as Steve pulled her away, leaving a trail of black plastic ribbon and crumpled T-shirts. Unable to reach the bags any more, Jo turned on Steve and released months of pent-up anger and frustration as she punched and clawed at him.
‘Steven!’ a voice boomed.
Steve and Jo both froze then turned as one towards the door. Only minutes earlier, Irene had looked at Jo with eyes brimming with sympathy, now there was only pain. She looked from one to the other and then let her gaze fall to the floor where the detritus of Steve’s life lay scattered. The bin bag Steve had been pulling Jo away from lay gaping with the arm of a waterproof coat reaching out towards them, the cuff partly melted and the sleeve a mangled mess of charcoal black and olive green.
The colour drained from Steve’s face as Irene stepped purposefully across the room. The sound of the slap was a thunderclap that heralded a cloudburst.
26
When Jo returned home the sun was obscured by a curtain of grey, but there was enough light left in the day to see Steph’s car parked outside the house. Jo wanted time on her own to think and considered driving past and parking somewhere out of sight until her sister went away. She had been haunted for months by unfathomable questions that might explain why David had left her only to have them swept away by a single, pathetic confession. But Jo’s momentary euphoria had been eclipsed by the one question that Steve couldn’t answer and she asked it over and over again: if you didn’t leave me, if you haven’t been shadowing me all this time, then where are you, David?
As Jo pulled into the drive she was reminded of all those unremarkable car journeys they had taken together, never once considering that the drive home on the evening before David’s trip to Leeds would be their last. With her eyes fixed firmly to the front, Jo began to reach a
hand over to the passenger seat as if she could reconnect with the man she remembered and not the demon she had imagined him to be for far too long. Her fingers stretched tentatively towards the space he ought to occupy, the tips of her fingers electrified with desperate longing as if she was within a hair’s breadth of the man she loved. He was sitting next to her and any moment now she would touch his arm, trace her hand towards his neck, comb her fingers through his hair and pull him towards her. Together again, at last …
Jo held her breath, anticipating that the power of her mind would give substance to her desire but her fingers sliced through emptiness. With a sob that caught in her throat, she let her hand fall but it dropped only a couple of inches before hitting rigid plastic. She trailed her fingers around the curve of the baby carrier handle until she touched lamb-soft wool. Spreading her hand wide and with barely any pressure at all, she explored the folds of the blanket until she found that long-lost connection back to her husband: Archie, David’s flesh and blood.
She turned to Archie and braved a smile. ‘Welcome home, sweetheart.’
Her eyes were glistening as she turned to open the car door where a shadow loomed in front of her. Jo got out of the car as if she hadn’t seen it and walked to the passenger side to retrieve her son. She wondered whether or not Steph would go away if she continued to ignore her but she knew her sister too well.
‘You might as well make yourself useful and help carry some of Archie’s things into the house.’
Steph did as she was told without a word.
Once inside, Jo set about unwrapping each of Archie’s many layers until he was snuggled only in her arms. ‘So go on then,’ she demanded. After the day she’d had, Jo was more than ready to face her sister’s wrath. ‘Get it off your chest.’
‘I’m here to apologize.’
Jo’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t expected that. She was, after all, the one who had corrupted her niece. It had been irresponsible to let Lauren pierce her nose, whatever the reasoning behind it. If she had been in a better frame of mind, she wouldn’t have even considered it, she could see that now. She could see everything so much clearer since her confrontation with Steve. ‘No, I should be the one apologizing. I shouldn’t have done anything without your approval first.’
‘Lauren told me what happened.’
‘All of it?’
It was Steph’s turn to narrow her eyes. ‘I think so. The pathetic excuse of a boyfriend who I didn’t even know existed who thought he could deflower my daughter and then proceeded to destroy her already fragile self-confidence by calling her a ginger minger?’
‘Deflower?’ Jo asked with a smile.
‘She’s my baby girl, Jo. I’m not ready to think of it in any other terms.’
Jo continued to smile as she looked down at her sleeping son. He was eleven weeks old now but no bigger than a newborn. It was impossible to imagine him as a grown man let alone how she would deal with his rites of passage. ‘I understand,’ she said. Where once there had been cold fear at the prospect of being responsible for such a tiny being, now she felt warmth flooding her chest.
‘I see you’ve got him back.’
‘It was a close call. Are we friends again?’ Jo asked.
‘You’ve had me worried sick for the past couple of days, Jo. After everything you’ve been through I was so scared that I’d tipped you over the edge. I didn’t sleep at all on Sunday night and if I hadn’t managed to speak to Heather last night, who reassured me that you were OK, then you might have had the police breaking down your door at one point.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No, I’m sorry and I need you to know that no matter what you do or what you say, I’ll always love you. I’m never going to abandon you, Jo. I’m not David.’
Jo held her smile for a second, maybe two, and then the mask she had been presenting to her sister slowly began to crumble. Her lip trembled and the curve of her mouth dipped. ‘I don’t think he did abandon me, Steph.’ Her voice cracked and a cold shiver ran down her spine as she considered exactly what that meant. ‘I know where all the money went.’
As Jo described her confrontation with Steve, literally blow by blow, Steph’s mouth fell open.
‘It was meant to be a temporary loan,’ Jo explained of the money David had given Steve. ‘Apparently it was after David had taken me for the twenty-week scan. He told Steve he didn’t need the money he’d saved for a holiday until the baby was born, so he gave him his bank card to withdraw the £3,000 to pay off his debts, or some of them at least.’
‘But he carried on taking money after David went missing! How the hell does Steve justify that?’
‘According to Steve, he was trying to return the card when I caught him in the study that day after David had gone missing.’
There was nothing but contempt on Steph’s face when she said, ‘He couldn’t have tried very hard.’
Steve’s confession had sickened Jo and she could barely repeat his excuses. ‘He says that when he started taking out more cash, it was to help me. He used it to pay for decorating the nursery.’
‘£300 for a pot of paint? I hope you’re not falling for any of this. He took your coat, Jo, and kept it hidden so he could use it to creep around impersonating his brother. He even used his left hand to throw us all off the scent, for God’s sake, and the only reason you caught him out was because he was too drunk the second time to remember. It’s not just theft, it’s callous and cruel because it gave you hope that David was still alive.’
Jo gave a broken laugh. ‘He actually tried to convince me that it was an act of kindness because it made Irene and me feel better. And when I didn’t fall for that one, he tried to say how his dad’s death had affected him as deeply as it had the rest of the family – but I swear, Steph, if there was one person who actually agreed with Alan’s last words about family being a burden, it was Steve.’
‘So is he still trying to say he thinks David left of his own accord or … not?’
The residual anger left Jo’s body with a sigh. ‘I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. I think he believed what suited him at the time, but then I can hardly blame him for that.’
‘You can’t, but the police can. Have you phoned them yet?’
‘I couldn’t while I was at Irene’s. She’s absolutely devastated.’
‘She’s not taking Steve’s side, is she?’
Jo shook her head. ‘No, she’s as desperate as I am to get the search started again. We’ve wasted so much time.’
‘Yes, we have,’ Steph said. She was already reaching for the phone.
The angelic child that Jo had brought home from his grandmother’s house a few hours earlier was reacquainting himself with his vocal chords and his screams were deafening. Up until that point, she had been so proud of herself. It had been a gruelling day but one she had faced without once hesitating at the front door, not even when she had left to go to the police station to make a formal statement. While the flimsy world she had created to make sense of David’s disappearance lay in ruins, Jo had somehow remained standing. But now, as she watched her son turn bright red with fury, she felt an old fear returning – how could she be a mother to this baby, the one whose conception she had been blaming for driving her husband away as much as she had blamed herself?
‘I’m not falling at the last hurdle,’ she told him in the gentlest of voices that belied the tremble in her throat. She patted the baby’s arched back in a slow, steady rhythm and willed her pulse to do the same.
Like a bottle of soda being agitated, Jo could feel the bubbles of panic rising in her stomach so she retreated to the nursery and waited for the sunflowers to begin their merry dance before settling into the rocking chair and attempting to give her freshly bathed son his last bottle before bedtime.
‘I remember the first time I ever saw your dad,’ she whispered when Archie stopped crying momentarily to explore the teat of the bottle. ‘He was wearing …’ Jo tried to summon up the image in her m
ind.
The meeting had been in Nelson’s boardroom and Jo had chosen a seat closest to the door while David had been hemmed into the corner. All eyes were on him as he tried to explain his ideas for some project or other. He had been wearing a suit, possibly dark grey, and perhaps a white shirt. She couldn’t recall, and for a moment this made her sad, but then she remembered the most important thing. ‘He was wearing a smile,’ she told Archie. ‘Not a big cheesy one, it was more of a mischievous grin and he aimed it at me. What could I do? I cut him down and wiped that smile off his face, but your dad was a glutton for punishment. He kept coming back for more.’
When Jo returned to the present, the lullaby was still tinkling in the background but it was the long, satisfied gulps coming from Archie that took her by surprise. The baby’s eyes were heavy but he was looking directly at her. ‘So why didn’t he come back this time?’ his gaze asked.
‘I don’t know, Archie,’ she said, ‘but I really believe that he would come back to us if he could.’
The thought that something bad had happened to David ought to have terrified her as much, if not more so, than in those early days. She remembered quite vividly that sensation of having her heart torn out of her chest and ice-cold fear pumped into her veins. It was a feeling that would undoubtedly return, but for the moment she was in the eye of a storm. After months of denying her true feelings and learning to despise the husband who had abandoned her, Jo felt such a pure rush of love for the man she had given her heart and soul to, that it took her breath away.
27
‘It’s a straw,’ Jo said, pointing out the obvious when Heather handed it to her.
They were having lunch at the Neighbourhood Café the day after Steve had made his confession. Jo had selected the same table where she had met Simon but today there was no desire to look out of the window and scan every face, no flutter of expectation that a passer-by would turn and give her that enigmatic smile. She wasn’t searching for the man who was capable of turning his back on his wife and child because he didn’t exist. There were, however, more practical considerations for choosing the table. It was the easiest place to park the pram. Archie had just been fed and, with a little help from Heather, was now sleeping peacefully so his mother could enjoy her own lunch in peace.
The Missing Husband Page 29