The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  Ali looked at her phone: almost five. She’d told Mum she’d be there by half past, at the latest – had written it on a post-it by the clock. Christ knew what chaos would ensue if she was late, having written it down. Adrian had promised, reluctantly and with the trophy wife bleating in the background, that he’d be there tomorrow evening. Would stay over.

  Martin Beston wasn’t top of the list of names, nor was Rob Webster. Gerard had breezed past her on his way up there, to the reservoir. ‘I’ll keep you posted, DC Compton,’ he said. ‘Ed’s stopping here, if you need to … go over anything.’ A smirk from Ed Carswell.

  ‘Where’s DC Watts?’ she asked, and the men shrugged at each other.

  ‘You send her out for sweeties again?’ said Gerard.

  Gerard might have been picking his spots at the other end of the country when rumours were going around about Black Barn that summer, but Ali had grown up five miles away from the place, and even though she’d been off doing her training when it was closed down, it would have been her first port of call in this investigation. So how come Nick Jason was top of Gerard’s list?

  Half an hour’s googling on her phone in the car park had told Ali that Nick Jason owned Club Sound Logistics, the warehouse on the Sandpiper estate opposite Nathan’s empty office, so Gerard knew that much, and hadn’t bothered informing Ali.

  Nathan had been watching Jason, not the other way around. But as an idea began to form, the sliding doors opened and there she was.

  ‘Sadie,’ she said. ‘DC Watts.’ A shifty look: Ali knew what this was about. It was about different ways of handling Doug Gerard, and getting on, and who knew? Sadie’s was probably cleverer. Head down, mouth shut, ears open. ‘I get it,’ Ali said, wearily. ‘I get it. I won’t tell him you’ve said a thing. But let’s suppose he’s wrong about that woman taking a knife to her husband – I’m all she and her kids have got. So tell me. About Nick Jason, and what Nathan Hall was up to.’

  Sadie Watts set her mouth in a line.

  ‘All right, Sadie, how about I tell you what I think?’

  Fran was on the ladder under the trapdoor to the attic when it came back to her in a rush, it raised a prickle on the back of her neck.

  Nick had mentioned it almost as an afterthought, diffident, cautious.

  ‘I saw him, you know,’ he said, and he’d looked down at his hands, relaxed in his lap. ‘Of course, I didn’t know it was him, I didn’t know it was Nathan, your Nathan. Alan Nathan Hall, according to the paper.’ He looked up then. ‘I saw him where I keep my stuff. The warehouse. The Sandpiper.’

  It had been Karen that had put it out of her mind, leaning down at the window to take charge, all brisk and refusing to take no for an answer. ‘Out you get,’ she said. Plumber’s on his way. Got him on speed-dial, as a matter of fact, he’s got a bit of a soft spot for me. Snow coming? You can’t just leave it.’

  And that had been the next couple of hours taken care of, the blessing of not having to think, just for a bit. There had been tea to be made and the plumber in her kitchen within a half-hour, a big bashful man eyeing Karen with wonder as she sat at the table with her plump, soft, manicured hands round a mug.

  It was Karen who’d sent her up to the attic, too, although indirectly. She would probably have been horrified, thought Fran, to think of her halfway up a stepladder on her own. But it had been Karen who’d cocked an ear at the sound, as they stood together on the landing outside Emme’s room, the faint spidery scuttle of something.

  Fran and Karen had been on the landing together outside the bedroom, the house had been beginning to warm up at last and the plumber sent on his way, flushed with pleasure at a job well done and Karen’s approval. Emme was playing on the bedroom floor with Harry, together they were building another elaborate fortress, dividing the labour. Emme was bossing Harry into a corner, his small head bent over as he banged with a wooden hammer. It had been in the sudden silence when the banging stopped that they heard it, just for a second, a scratchy echo over their heads that stopped as though it knew they were listening.

  ‘Rats?’ Karen’s upturned face had been grim and pale. ‘You want to put something down,’ she said, pushing the door into the bedroom open wider. ‘Come along, Harry. Time to get home.’

  ‘I’ve got some stuff,’ said Fran, ‘for the rats.’ Remembering Nathan coming back with the plain cardboard box of lurid green pellets trying to think where he’d put it.

  It came as a shock to her that Nick had even known who Nathan was. She had told him nothing, in the months then years after she left him, not about Nathan, about getting pregnant, not about getting married. She hadn’t answered his messages, she hadn’t made arrangements to retrieve the toothbrush, the books, the old, soft, much-washed T-shirt under his pillow nor the pairs of heels and clean knickers she’d left in his wardrobe – she just turned her back on all of it.

  Fran supposed he had asked around: someone would have told him Nathan’s name.

  ‘The Sandpiper?’ she said, bewildered. ‘But that’s where he had his office.’

  Nick had raised his head then, looking through the windscreen at something she couldn’t see. ‘Small world,’ he had said, eventually, but when he turned his head to her his eyes were dark, thoughtful.

  ‘I looked for him,’ he said abruptly. ‘I tried to find him online, when Carine told me his name.’

  ‘You did?’ And apprehension stirred. She hadn’t let herself wonder what Nick was thinking or doing, those long-ago months. She’d just dumped the roses when they came, and then one day they’d stopped coming. ‘And what?’

  ‘Not much,’ he said shortly. ‘Look, I’m not proud of it. But I had nothing. You wouldn’t talk to me. I found some website for his firm, is all. Pretty basic stuff. I didn’t know what you could see in him. I wanted to see his face, but there was nothing. A few other Nathan Halls, in New Zealand, one in France.’

  ‘Carine was talking to you?’ Carine had always liked Nick, Fran could remember the quick flash of excitement when she’d heard they weren’t a couple any more.

  Nick laughed miserably. ‘For a bit. She got bored pretty quick, when all I wanted to know about was you.’ He looked tired: for a second she wanted to put an arm round him except then he turned his head just a fraction and she saw, he was waiting for that, for her to soften, and she wasn’t sure it was in the past, at all. Nick turned back to the windscreen.

  ‘No pictures of him,’ he mused. ‘On all the internet, hardly a trace of him at all, in fact. It was frustrating, and it was odd, I thought. Maybe because I wasn’t looking for Alan Nathan Hall. But still. Not Facebook, not LinkedIn, nothing personal or professional. Odd.’

  She didn’t do Facebook but Carine did, the girls from school who’d come along to the wedding did, it had been in their conversation while they took selfies outside the registry office on the busy road. Had the property developer taken photos? Julian hadn’t. Even as she wondered it came back to her, his hand up quickly to shield his face. ‘No press,’ he’d said, joking, and Carine had put her camera down indulgently. They’d thought he was sheepish about his big beer gut, the red face, too old for that sort of thing.

  But in Oakenham, in Cold Fen, out here they remembered Nathan, they didn’t need Google, they didn’t need to search the internet for images. Had he understood that, how long memories were out here? Nathan hadn’t recognised Dearborn, but Dearborn had known who he was.

  On the back doorstep in the icy dark with Harry pressing himself fearfully into the shaggy fur on her coat, Karen had said, ‘I couldn’t stand it, knowing they were up there. Rats. You get ’em sorted.’ There had been something in Karen’s face she’d only glimpsed before, something drawn and ruthless. Was that country people?

  It was only after she’d gone, she’d thought, she should have asked Karen about Black Barn, because Karen had been here her whole life, because her dad had been a police officer. Instead, she had just sat there between Karen and the plumber, wanting the peace not to st
op, the cups of tea and the other quiet voices in her house.

  And now on the ladder with the box of poison in one hand and the other pressing tentatively at the trapdoor, she had remembered that it had been Karen who’d first pointed it out to her. That you could move away from your childhood home and think that all those faces belonged in the past, almost like you’d made them up – she’d thought that way about Nick, until she’d seen him on the bridge, until she learned that he hadn’t forgotten her, not for one minute.

  Cemented shut with spider-dust and damp, the trapdoor resisted. Fran pushed harder and she felt the ladder wobble.

  If she fell.

  Emme was asleep in bed; she had taken a little while. Sitting beside her Fran had said, thinking it was something to look forward to, ‘Your auntie’s coming tomorrow, Daddy’s sister.’

  But Emme had sat bolt upright and said, her eyes wide and black in the dark, ‘My auntie’s not dead, she’s not dead too?’

  Fran had had to hold her arms gently. ‘It’s all right, just because one person dies, it doesn’t mean … We’re safe, Emme.’

  She had lain back down then, murmuring, ‘No, it’s just Harry’s auntie.’

  ‘What?’ whispered Fran, but Emme turned on the pillow, burrowing, already asleep.

  Ben was in his cot, fed, not sleeping but gazing at a magic lantern someone had given them; as she set her foot on the ladder she’d heard a soft gurgle from him.

  If she fell. The panic button on the side in the kitchen. Gingerly, Fran bent and set the box of pellets down on the top of the stepladder. She knew the sensible thing would be to do it tomorrow, do it by daylight, with someone else here, but instead she straightened, one hand free now to steady herself as with the other she gave the trap a shove, upwards, as hard as she could. It gave. At the same time the ladder tipped under her and she grabbed, got her fingers under the trapdoor and got a purchase on the frame it sat in. The ladder settled back on its feet.

  Gingerly, she pushed the trapdoor right back and put the box down inside, on something soft. Just leave it there, she thought, but she knew that wasn’t what she was going to do. Why else had she tracked down the torch, checked it had batteries, stashed it securely in the waistband of her jeans? If it’s up there, I want to see it. She felt a fine gritty dust dislodged by the opening of the trap settle on her face and she clamped her mouth closed against it, up and hauled herself in over the ledge.

  The steep-pitched roof space rose above her, towering in the dark. She smelled ancient timber and the things that lived in and on it out of the light, the air filled with spores. She sat on the edge and fished for the torch although the square of light shed up through the trapdoor illuminated the angled beams immediately above it and showed her that the soft she’d felt was wadding put down as insulation. She slid the trap back a little way, reducing the light to a triangle, and stepped back. Turned on the torch.

  ‘So you saw him on the Sandpiper,’ she had said to Nick. ‘What was he doing?’

  Nick had looked at her, long and thoughtful. ‘Did you love him?’ he asked. She saw his eyes look to where her coat was open and she knew what he wanted even before his hand moved inside her coat and he made a sound in his throat, a groan. ‘Did he do what I did for you?’

  She looked at him a moment and said nothing. She closed her eyes just a second to feel the warmth and weight of his hand, then it was gone, she heard Nick sigh. She opened her eyes.

  ‘He looked like he was waiting for someone,’ he said, and his hand was out of sight, his voice was cool and remote. ‘Smoking a cigarette, walking round the back of my warehouse. He stopped when he saw me, and trod out the cigarette, looking at me all the time, like some kind of hard man.’

  ‘Did he know who you were?’ she asked quietly and as his eyes widened in surprise she saw a trace of the old Nick, quick on his feet, looking for possibilities.

  ‘I don’t know, I hadn’t thought of that.’ And they’d looked at each other, weighing it up.

  In the attic the torch shone on something stacked, four, five yards away from her in the gloom.

  On her knees she crawled over the wadding towards it. She felt sharp fibres from the insulation material catch in her skin, the air thick with choking particles, but she kept crawling until she was there. A box. Some stuffed carrier bags – she shone the torch and saw fabric, a fastening, a strap. A couple of plastic bags from chain stores, one was made of card with ribbon ties, a lingerie shop. She propped the torch between her knees and pulled at random: cheap slippery black fabric, then something transparent, crackling with static, scratchy lace.

  She took up the torch and peered down into the box. A stack of magazines, old porn mags to judge from the top one, she saw spread knees, white stockings and a woman’s hand under the lettering. She reached down into the box beside the stack to where something was tangled, a nylon wig that slid under her fingers and then buckles, leather, a harness of some kind. As she lifted it a small spray of paper was dislodged in her face, like a shower of playing cards, and for a moment she was disorientated. She couldn’t tell what she was holding but then she raised the strapped apparatus and saw what was attached to it, and a sudden sweat broke under her armpits.

  Her face burning in the dark, she shoved the thing back inside the box and went into reverse, scrambling backwards to the trapdoor where she stopped, her feet through the hole. She breathed, she fought the urge to scratch at herself where the sweat and dust had caked on her skin, to pull off her clothes where the spores had settled. It’s not illegal, she repeated in her head, it’s not criminal, it’s not – but it was. Wrong. What was wrong was that it was still there, it had been left behind.

  Something had caught in her sweater: one of the cards released when she lifted the black leather harness. She lifted it out carefully: not a playing card but a business card, of a kind. She turned it over.

  Below her the yellow light shone, she could see the worn landing carpet. Ben must have gone to sleep because it was so quiet she could hear the minuscule creak of the lantern turning in his room. She leaned forwards, her hands on the lip of the trapdoor, she leaned to listen because she was sure she could even hear him breathing.

  Some quirk of the acoustic, high up here under the badly insulated roof, meant that she could hear it. Down below, out there where her car was parked. Footsteps in the yard.

  A sound, not quite human.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Had she left the back door open after Karen? Stupid fucking moron. Stupid lazy feckless fucking idiot.

  Did she even think for a moment about staying where she was? Of sliding the hatch closed and sitting in the dark? Not with the boxful of stale underwear and rubber, with the ladder on the landing pointing to where she was hiding, and the children asleep in their rooms? No. Was the sound outside, or in?

  There hadn’t been more than a second before she moved. Lowering her hips through the gap towards the ladder it was as though Fran’s senses had narrowed to a single focus, tracking through the house to where that sound was coming from, and her brain was in overdrive behind it. Could be anyone, the pig farmer back again, could be the police, but they’d knock, they’d ring, could be Karen, left something behind and letting herself back in. Karen, come to help her kill the rats.

  No. Karen didn’t breathe like that, she didn’t blunder, like an animal. Fran knew who it was, she knew before she ran into the kitchen and saw that she hadn’t left the door unlocked after all. He was there, though, he was right outside her door. She could hear him.

  There was a split second when Fran thought, Stay inside, before she charged the door. She yanked at the bolt, she turned the key, her breath hoarse, she tugged it open and was outside. ‘Come on then,’ she yelled, into the darkness. And then he came out of the night and was on her, his hands were on her shoulders propelling her back inside, his breath was in her face, and he was in her kitchen. Bez.

  He was so tall he seemed to fill the kitchen. His matted hair brushed
the ceiling, and his eyes were bloodshot. The room smelled of earth, of river and sweat. Of booze: as they came through the door he staggered, steadied only when he came up against the sink and she saw his hands, lined with dirt, his fingernails were black. It was as if she knew him, had always known him, had seen him leaning against that war memorial or passed out in the shade, under a hedge by the river. He was part of Nathan; he was the part of Nathan she had never got to.

  You’d smell him a mile off, she remembered hearing Gerard mutter to Carswell of John Martin, and involuntarily her hand came to her mouth at the thought of the box in the attic. Bez stumbled towards her at the gesture, his hands out, ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, don’t, no, I never meant, I never meant…’

  She stood her ground, but it wasn’t his smell that turned her stomach: if she closed her eyes she would only smell the outside, the standing water in the fields and the river, weed and iron and earth. Fran didn’t move and Bez came up close so she could see the red in the great bush of his beard, and the grime on his collar. The blue of his sore eyes, and to her surprise in that close moment she felt no charge come off him, no fear. He held his hands inches away from her and trembling as if he didn’t dare touch her; as if he was the one in danger.

  ‘I loved him,’ he said, and the alcohol on his breath smelled almost pure.

  She put up her hands to his, hovering, not touching. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, bracing herself to stop the shaking before it began, feeling it rise from her knees. She was up against the counter, her backside pressed against it. It was there behind her, plugged in, charged, the panic button. This was what it was for.

  He looked down at her hands and swayed, then when he looked back up she saw she could have been mistaken. What she had thought was innocence in the blue of his eyes could be something else, like the alcohol she smelled on his breath, a capacity for violence so pure it ran clear.