The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  ‘Could he…’

  Karen had said it, when you come back, the people you left behind don’t always like it, but it stuck in her throat. The man in her bedroom: the heavy tread. No, no, no. ‘You’ve got to tell the police about him.’

  ‘No!,’ said Rob, and his eyes were all over the place. ‘No, you don’t understand, he wouldn’t – Bez would never…’

  And from upstairs it came, a sudden shout, from Emme’s room. Not a whimper but a loud, fierce noise, NO, as if there was someone in there with her, and Emme, brave Emme was facing him down, she was fighting. Fran was on her feet, Ben against her shoulder.

  She had got to the bottom of the stairs when she felt the icy air and turned, but Rob was gone and the door was swinging open behind him.

  Fran made herself cross the room and close it – lock it, bolt it – top and bottom, before she went upstairs.

  When she heard the police car and the voices below the window from where she lay, Fran’s first thought was that harm had come to Rob. Somewhere in the black fields, driving along an unlit road. She was on Emme’s bed, squeezed between them, Ben asleep and snuffling in her armpit. She must have been asleep herself because she was stiff and disorientated at the sounds outside.

  Struggling up, she tried not to wake Ben. She crept down the corridor and laid him in his cot. She covered him. The house was locked, they’d ring the bell, they’d knock, they’d wake him. But she didn’t hurry. While they were outside and the door was locked it was her house.

  They were knocking, softly, as Fran came into the kitchen where the lights were still on, but she paused to kneel and retrieve the nappy from under the table, she pulled a plastic bag from the holder, flipped the bin and set it on top, under the lid. She looked at the clock as she reached up for the bolt. It was almost nine o’clock.

  ‘Sorry to come so late,’ said Gerard and for a second she had a flashback to an old life, a parallel world, Nick turning up on her doorstep looking pumped, ready to go, and his low dark car blinking in the street behind him. Hey, Frankie, I knew you’d be pleased to see me. Gerard didn’t look sorry, like Nick he looked energised, alive, as if late nights agreed with him. Carswell was behind him, his narrow little face bobbing to see her over his boss’s shoulder. There was no sign of Ali Compton.

  ‘You’d better come in,’ she said.

  The first thing Fran did when they left was to cross back to the fliptop bin and open it. She took out the plastic bag holding Ben’s dirty nappy. It was true, really, they hardly smelled bad when the baby was so small but she wouldn’t have noticed it anyway.

  ‘Did you see Rob?’ she had asked and Gerard had frowned, impatient. ‘Rob?’

  ‘He was here. He said … the friend, Bez, their friend from years back—’

  ‘That’s not what we came about,’ said Gerard and she heard a warning in his voice.

  ‘Where’s Ali?’

  ‘Ali will be back tomorrow,’ he said, patiently. ‘If you want her.’

  Fran stared a second – Of course I want her – then hurried on.

  ‘Bez, he ran a scaffolding business, you should be able to find him from that? He started drinking, Rob said, so maybe he’s got a record, a police record.’ They looked back at her, Gerard impassive, just waiting for her to finish, and Carswell curious. It felt as if she’d been waiting so long to say her piece, to give them a shove, Fran wasn’t going to stop now.

  ‘They shared a squat in Oakenham, Black Barn it was called. Years back. Fifteen, twenty years? Something happened there.’

  And then she came to a halt because she hadn’t known that was what she was going to say, and because of the way they were looking at her.

  ‘We’ve heard something,’ said Gerard, and beside him Carswell was raised on the balls of his feet, bouncing with anticipation. ‘About you.’

  After they’d gone Fran had locked the door again behind them and then she’d sat on her haunches with her back set against it a moment, waiting for the sound of the police car’s engine. Now she stood over the bin and she opened up the nappy carefully, delicately.

  She’d seen the way Gerard had looked around her tidy kitchen, momentarily distracted by its cleanness, briefly approving, like Nathan.

  They had been watching her. She could see it now, as if from high above, they thought she wasn’t behaving as a bereaved woman should, never mind she had children, and what was she supposed to do, was she supposed to go to pieces so they could swoop, get inside her house and tear it all apart? They had been waiting for her to make a false move. Who jumps first? And now they’d jumped.

  ‘You came here to make a fresh start with your husband.’ That had been Carswell, earnest and wide-eyed but sly all the time, and uncertainly Fran had nodded.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You came here because you’d had an affair.’ And that had been Gerard. Fran had stared at him, overwhelmingly aware that these men were not her friends, not even her allies. Who told you?

  Was one night an affair?

  A man climbing out of a taxi in the rain, walking up some stairs in front of her, letting her in to a dim untidy room. A man who went over to a drawer and got something out of a packet before she had even located the unmade bed, the tiny sound in her ears as she had sat on an unmade bed and concentrated on thinking nothing, feeling nothing.

  What did they think they knew?

  The nappy lay open in the bin and she saw it, the tiny scrap of blue packaging that had been under her bed when she’d left Ben there and he’d rolled on to his belly. He must have reached for it, inquisitive, sharp-eyed. Would she have recognised it even without the telltale letters the –ex that was all that was left of the brand name? The man in her bed the night Nathan died had used a condom.

  Inside her that tiny scrap of information seeded, it grew. And then she smelled it, then she felt it coming up inside her like acid: it had been in Ben’s mouth, in her baby’s mouth, passing through his small perfect system. She ran blindly into the hall and blundered through the toilet door, head down in the dark. They’re gone, it’s all right, they’re gone, they can’t hear. Or were they out there in the night, listening?

  Fran had known what they were going to say next before Doug Gerard said it. A newsreel of boyfriends, husbands, wives, weeping for the cameras, blinking in flashbulbs, flinching at questions. Next, they needed a lawyer.

  ‘We need witnesses,’ he spoke gently. ‘We need your help.’ She nodded, dumb. ‘We’d like you to hold a press conference, tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Mum?’

  Ali called up the dark stairs to the room with light coming under the door. As she came in her mother looked up from the bed, sweet and serene, the bedside lamp on, book in her lap, the little TV flickering on her bedside table. All that was wrong this time was she was wearing her coat, done up to the neck.

  ‘You cold, Mum?’ said Ali, gently, unbuttoning the coat for her as she sat on the bed, checking round the room at the same time, registering the air smelled clean, the sheets were dry. ‘They came in this afternoon then?’ She leaned her mother forward to pull the coat out from under her in the bed. She knew the carers had been because the bins had been put out and the kitchen table was clear.

  ‘Who’s that, dear?’ said her mother, smiling, and Ali saw in the faded periwinkle eyes that she was recognised, at least, she wasn’t her dead auntie June or the postman’s wife. ‘I’ve had a lovely day, I sat in the garden, I think I caught a bit of sun. We picked the raspberries.’

  The fruit cages had been gone from the back garden since the last millennium and the sun hadn’t been out all day. There were no raspberries.

  It was hovering around zero out there, but felt colder with the wind. Straight from Siberia, that’s what they said, across the Wash and the snow would be here by the weekend. Ali’s heart sank, thinking of Mum when the snow came, she’d probably think she was ten years old and go out skating on the Fen. For a guilty moment it seemed such a peaceful thought, Mum lying down in th
e snow and going to sleep. It wouldn’t work like that, sod’s law, the ice would crack under her and she’d drown, slow and painful in the freezing ditch, that long confusing life shaken up again and passing before her terrified eyes.

  She’d have to call Adrian, get him over to cover for her. She was his mother too, after all, though he visited so rarely she probably wouldn’t know it any more. ‘Mum,’ she began, tentatively. Fran Hall was holding on, she was staying put for whatever reasons she had, the children, or stubbornness, defending her home against the likes of DS Doug Gerard, but she was scared of something worse than him. ‘I was going to give Adrian a call. He’s been asking when he can visit, and now I’m back at work…’

  Mum’s head tipped on one side, her eyes all dreamy. ‘Little Adie,’ she said, soft as butter. ‘I’d like to see Adie,’ and she began to shift on the pillows. ‘Will he bring that girlfriend of his?’

  Ali’s heart sank, God only knew which girlfriend she had in mind, but almost certainly not hard-faced Natalie, mother of his twins and keeper of the show home they lived in, twenty miles away. ‘I don’t suppose so,’ she said gently, patting the pillow, and the old head settled back down.

  ‘Shame you never had any.’ There were moments like this, when the fog cleared and she was sharp as a tack, so sharp she even knew what Ali was thinking.

  ‘Yes, Mum, it is.’ Kids, was what she meant. Mum hardly saw Adrian’s: Natalie said it would freak them out, even though Mum wouldn’t raise her voice or hurt a fly.

  The day would come, soon enough, that Mum would be loaded into some ambulance and taken to a place she didn’t know to spin out the last days and weeks, no more raspberry-picking, no more skating on the Fen.

  ‘Just get off,’ Gerard had said, his eyes narrow. ‘We can manage fine without you. She’s got your number and she made no bones about it, wanted us out of there.’

  Fran Hall. Dumped out here, in the middle of nowhere. You could see it in her eyes, though, she wasn’t going to give in. She was holding it together with the kids. For the kids. Gerard didn’t seem to understand that; the way he saw it, it was what Ali was there for, to monitor the children’s safety – so he could leave it out of the equation. He could decide Hall was a cold bitch, he could apply pressure even though, Christ knew, she was under enough of it already, and wait, with that giggling kid Carswell gazing at him like he was God, they could wait and see what happened. Was that good policing?

  Ali, without applying any pressure at all, could see that Fran Hall was hiding something. That she was experiencing guilt. She could also see that the woman hadn’t killed her husband, or had him killed. And that when it came to hiding stuff, there was plenty Gerard wasn’t saying, either. That husband of hers, Nathan Hall, if that’s who he really was, Ali might have been tempted to hit him over the head with a rock herself but then perhaps that was why she’d never been married. Policemen round her day in day out, enough to put you off for life.

  Under the coat Mum was wearing a cotton summer dress and a pink cardie. Ali laid the coat on the chair, pulled the satin quilt up over them and leaned back on the pillow, her head next to her mother’s.

  ‘You get on back to your mother,’ Gerard had said in the corridor at the station, dismissing her. ‘Hall will be in touch if she wants our support and if she doesn’t…’ he spread his hands, smiling briefly, ‘that’s not our problem, is it?’ A burst of deep laughter from behind him in the canteen.

  Had Doug Gerard always been like this? He’d always been a hard-arse, but he’d turned sour when the last woman left him, Lara, a horsey girl, a big blonde. They liked his looks, they liked his stern way with them, like he knew what he was doing, but they didn’t like the hours he worked or the bitterness he brought home with him, the contempt. Let them drown in their own vomit, let them overdose, let them freeze to death boozed up to the eyeballs. Not our problem, that was Gerard. Ali didn’t know what was underneath any more; once upon a time she could have been bothered working out what made a copper tick. Not any more.

  ‘Valentine’s on Sunday, Ma,’ she said, on the pillow. ‘They say it’s going to snow.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Thursday

  It was so cold at eight that the windscreen was frosted hard and Fran had to clear it. She drove slowly, gripping the wheel tight with Ben in his car seat beside her gazing through the window, reflections of the grey outside in his eyes. A long, straight road in the lee of a windswept dyke seemed to go on for ever, then it turned sharply at ninety degrees and there was a truck thundering towards her. She hit the verge and hung on, grim, registering the thought that popped up, beyond her control: that would be easy, that would wipe it all out, sideswiped by a turnip truck into the black fen. Except for Emme.

  An affair. She didn’t understand – it seemed impossible that the police could have found out about the one-night stand. Fran didn’t even know his name herself, she had erased him.

  Jo: the only one who knew.

  She’d left Emme with Karen, who had accepted her without comment but had closed the door on her before she’d had a chance to say thank you, or sorry, or to try to explain what kind of shit she was in, up to her neck. But she had to leave Emme because Ben wouldn’t ask questions, Ben would forget all this – but Emme stored things away. You could see it in her clear, pale, inquisitive eyes, hungry for information, for answers.

  Waiting for her in the reception area, Ali Compton looked like Fran felt: stunned, exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes. She looked like she had picked the same clothes she’d been wearing the day before off the floor, too. Jeans and a sweatshirt with a logo on it.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she said. ‘Is there a … a special room? A conference room?’ She felt a knot form under her ribs at the thought that she would be the person on the screen, the evening news, blinking in the bright lights behind a table. Four days ago, less than a week: Sunday evening, was there anything safer than a Sunday evening, bad telly, school in the morning? He had been alive.

  ‘I’ll show you.’ Ali knelt to where Ben sat in the car seat, and gave him her finger to hold. He seized it, tried to get to it with his other hand. Ali looked up at her, anxious.

  ‘I’m taking him,’ she said, and she detached his finger gently, took hold of the baby seat’s handle. ‘That’s all right, is it?’

  Fran felt things go into slow motion. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I … you can’t…’

  ‘Just while you’re in there,’ said Ali, patiently, and patted her arm. ‘Don’t panic,’ she said quietly. ‘I’ll be right there when you’re done. I’ll be right outside the door with him.’

  The conference room was hot and crowded, rows of seats and twenty, maybe thirty people, a buzz of chatter that died as she was led in. Journalists; old hands, a day’s work for them. There were only half a dozen women among them, all younger than the men, all looking rough under the glare of striplighting. At the back Fran saw a camera, a man’s face bobbing out from behind it to get a look at her, then it was gone again. She could feel the silent presence of DS Gerard at her back as they walked in, corralling her. There were three microphones, Gerard, a police PR man, and her between them.

  The PR man addressed the journalists, giving a warning, this access was conditional on them respecting her privacy, staying away from the house. Fran hadn’t even thought about that, journalists doorstepping her; she was grateful for the nods she saw in the audience. Then Gerard was on his feet outlining the case. He was precise, clear, his voice was strong. Fran registered that a number of the women focused on him, gazing. One in the front row seemed to have a particularly unwavering stare. A good-looking policeman, he’d have his opportunities.

  ‘We are actively seeking information on Nathan Hall’s whereabouts between eight and ten o’clock on the evening of February the seventh,’ he finished, sitting down, and then it was Fran’s turn. She put out a hand and touched the microphone.

  Doug Gerard had told her she didn’t have to stand up: as the wa
lls seemed to close in she couldn’t have stood up if she wanted to.

  The door at the back of the room opened and as if down a long lens she glimpsed Carswell’s narrow foxy face as he slipped inside.

  Had they come here because she’d had an affair? She’d agreed to it because of that night. Yes. But Nathan hadn’t known about that night. He couldn’t have known.

  ‘My husband Nathan Hall was a good man,’ she began. ‘I don’t know who would have wanted to harm him.’ She barely recognised her own voice, it sounded so light and thin.

  Her children had lost their father, she said to the room of faces, Emme who was in her first year at the local school, Ben who was only three months old. She didn’t even know what she was saying: the faces were a blur, the women’s were sharper, brighter, she saw lipstick, shiny hair. A head bobbed over a notebook and a flash went off. She felt numb, removed, behind a glass wall. Just keep talking. ‘He was a good man.’

  At the table, flanked by the two policemen, Fran raised her eyes to the crowded room. ‘We made a family together.’

  She thought she’d been sure of that, since the first time: he wanted the children. He had said something to give her pause only once, a long way further down the line. About condoms, a terse comment along the lines of, he’d never been able to get along with them, they panicked him. But he had wanted a baby too, surely? By then she must have been three, four months gone, and it couldn’t have been just because he didn’t like wearing a condom? They were a family.

  But the truth ticked away as she scanned the strangers in the grey room. A blonde woman with black roots, a man with dandruff on suit shoulders, another in a grubby cagoule, hollow-cheeked under his hood. It settled like mud. A scrap of condom on her bedroom floor, that her husband would never have used. A man had come into her bed and fucked her. A shutter came down. Fran felt herself stare and stare to keep it down. Could they see? The faces stared back, some averted their eyes.

  What was love? Wanting to protect someone. Had she loved Nathan? She couldn’t think about the way his skin felt when she put her cheek against his back in the bed now, or she would break down, in front of all of them. She couldn’t see his face: she tried and tried.