The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  ‘It’s just, y’know,’ said Carswell conversationally, ‘she says he wasn’t in that night at all. The landlady says. In fact,’ and he turned the mug on the table in front of him, tilting his head to examine the logo on it, ‘she said he isn’t a regular, like. Seen him maybe a handful of times since you moved in?’

  ‘Do you think I’m lying?’ The words came out before she could stop them. Gerard’s eyes narrowed. ‘He went out a couple of times a week,’ she said, stiffly. ‘Thursdays and Sundays, usually. He said he was going to the Queen’s Head.’

  Gerard’s face invited the thought. So if you’re not lying, he was.

  But what he said was, ‘And he’d usually come in, what sort of time?’

  ‘I told you. Not late. Around closing time, eleven, that sort of time.’

  It was unreal, she had to stop it. She felt if she stood her head would hit the ceiling, things would go flying.

  Gerard didn’t move, sitting back in his chair relaxed, contemplating the room, the sink, the stove, the row of mugs. ‘But this time it was later,’ he said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Just trying, you know. To get the story straight, in my own mind.’

  ‘It’s not a story.’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ said Gerard, easily. She saw his gaze settle, and looked where he was looking.

  She gestured with her free hand, Ben’s head asleep on her other forearm. ‘What’s that?’ she said, and he got to his feet, crossed the room and brought a bag across.

  He pushed it towards her but she shook her head and peering inside he slid out a flat square box of expensive chocolates. ‘Huh,’ he said, surprised. Fran recognised the packaging, the French name on the box because she’d buy them for herself once in a while, way back when. In another life, in London. It was a small box, modest, but thirty quid’s worth of chocolate. Nathan.

  Fran felt sick. ‘I don’t know where they came from,’ she said, and she could hear the edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘Has someone come round? Has someone been here? I don’t know.’

  Carswell gaped.

  ‘Take them away,’ she said. ‘Please. I don’t want chocolates.’

  Gerard stood up and handed the box to Carswell, who made to hide it behind his back and said, ‘Nice one, boss. You shouldn’t have.’ They were watching her. She felt their eyes unpicking her reaction.

  She held herself very steady. ‘I need to call his family now,’ she said. Then, feeling their hostility like a wall, ‘If you don’t mind.’

  They stood aside.

  Chapter Eleven

  His family.

  From the beginning Nathan had been … not evasive exactly, more, impatient; more, dismissive.

  ‘My dad’s … well,’ he had said abruptly, one evening, Fran five months pregnant and suddenly looking it, and they’d been talking about getting stuff, laughing on the sofa about whether he could put a cot together. ‘You get to a point, don’t you, when you see what they’re like. Really like.’ Warily Fran had nodded, because she did know, because she’d got to that point fairly early, with her mother. Her dreamy mother, who would rather have been a sister than a parent.

  Nathan’s mother was in institutional care: she’d been bedridden for more than two years, unable to feed herself for five. He went there to see her three or four times a year, he said. Thinking of her own mother Fran had asked if she could come with him but he had been categorical. ‘They say she’s losing the ability to swallow,’ he had said, coming back the last time. So there was only really his father.

  ‘A miserable bastard, is what he is,’ Nathan had said, and she remembered him getting up, then pacing, sitting down again. And when eventually Nathan took Fran up there, at her insistence, she saw that a miserable bastard was exactly what he was, now at least. John Hall lived in sheltered housing in a village near where he’d been born on the north-eastern coastline, near somewhere called Alnwick. It was high and blowy but beautiful, and the one-bedroom bungalow was comfortable, but he grumbled about it. Staring in disgusted disbelief at the handrails, elbowing Nathan out of the way with silent hostility when he tried to wash up.

  ‘Told you,’ said Nathan, climbing cheerfully behind the wheel for the long journey back. And when they told him they were getting married and he announced he couldn’t come, not with his hip, he was waiting for the op, she hadn’t protested.

  She had, though, supposed that Nathan’s sister would come: Miranda. Because that was what this was for. Having no family of her own, unless you counted cousins she hadn’t seen since she was a toddler (after her mother took her to Greenham Common in a sling and was arrested they had been more or less disowned as an embarrassment). There needed to be someone beyond the two of them, beyond the half-dozen friends. Nathan, though, had just shrugged. ‘She’s on secondment to the office in Seoul for a month. She can’t get leave, she’s in the office at six every morning, weekends. It’s that kind of job.’ She was something in finance, selling emerging markets, whatever that meant. ‘Couldn’t she … They fly round the world all the time, don’t they? In that kind of job?’ And when he just shrugged, ‘I’d just like to meet her,’ she said, and had heard herself, plaintive, needy.

  ‘No,’ he said, and his voice had been hard for a second, before he softened it. ‘I’ve tried.’

  So it had been just the handful of them, the sharp-suited developer trying to pick Carine up on the registry office steps and Rob, shifting to get out of Julian Napier’s booming orbit.

  This man, said Nathan in the Italian restaurant after, as he settled an arm on Rob’s narrow shoulders, has known me for ever. Rob had blushed at that, but whenever Fran thought back to that afternoon, Rob was always blushing.

  At one point – the table by then a litter of coffee cups and the dregs of crazy drinks – Nathan had got up to go to the bathroom and Jo, whom Fran thought had gone home, had slipped into the seat beside her. ‘Seems like a nice guy,’ she said, nodding towards Rob. ‘Not that I could get more than a couple of words out of him. Kind of a sweetheart, though?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Fran, watching him as he fiddled with his phone, shy, anxious. Nathan protected him: she liked that. That was the place Rob had. ‘To be honest, I probably know about as much about him as you do. But yes.’

  The edge rubbed comfortably off her elegance after the hours at the table, Jo had sighed. ‘This is what you want, though,’ she said, frowning. ‘That’s all I care about.’

  She’d felt grateful for the concern she heard in Jo’s voice. But she hadn’t thought, Why is she so worried? At the bar Nathan was smiling, talking to the developer, he’d taken off his tie and looked young. Exhilarated. ‘Yes,’ said Fran, because in that moment, Emme in her arms and Jo sitting next to her, it was true. Who could tell the future, anyway? Sometimes you just had to jump.

  Back in the flat, half out of her uncomfortable dress, Fran had sat with Emme on the sofa, settling her. Nathan was in the bedroom moving around for a bit and soon there was silence, although she heard the ping of his phone once or twice. When finally she pushed the bedroom door open, at close to eleven, he was asleep on the bed, his face turned to the wall. His clothes were folded neatly on the chair, his phone was on the bedside table by his head, its screen face down.

  With relief Fran stripped off the dress and stuffed it into the washing basket, although she never wanted to see it again. Her flesh was marked where it had dug in at the waist. Motionless as a log, Nathan let out a snore and then before she could think about what she was doing Fran was padding around to his side of the bed. Picking up his phone.

  She looked at the messages. There was one from Julian, the construction bloke. Nice do. See you Thursday. She had thought he was in Leeds on Thursday. And the other one was from Miranda.

  There was no message thread attached to either. But Miranda’s was a response to something. I don’t believe you, it read. Indignant. A bit of warning might have been nice. Address? So I can at least send a present?

  ‘I tried,’ he’d said. But
he hadn’t.

  Absently she rubbed the screen to clean it, she could see her fingerprints, then realising what she was doing she set it down in a hurry. Had he even read the messages? If he hadn’t, he’d know someone had. That she had.

  But when he looked up at her from his cereal the next morning, dressed and neat and shaven with the phone on the table beside him as she wandered in dishevelled with Emme in her arms, he didn’t say anything about it.

  She opened her mouth to ask, any word from Miranda? But then he’d have known she’d looked at his phone. And besides, maybe there were reasons, maybe she just needed to be patient and he’d tell her why he hadn’t wanted his sister at their wedding, why she didn’t know where they lived. She didn’t want to get up from the breakfast table and challenge him.

  To stand up with Emme in her arms and say, you lied.

  ‘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 th
an 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.’