The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  ‘He come back for me,’ Bez said, his lips red and wet, too close to hers. His eyes brimming. ‘I heard he was back, I see him, I waited for him there but he never come.’

  And at her back, beyond the door into the house she heard something, footsteps on the stairs. Not Emme, no, back to bed. Back to bed, good girl. The footsteps stopped. Bez showed no sign of having heard but just that fraction of inattention had caught him, enraged him. He began to shake his head.

  ‘What happened in that house?’ she said, quietly. ‘Black Barn. What happened there?’

  ‘It were her fault,’ he said. ‘We never needed no fucking women,’ and he leaned towards her, as though he might fall on her. ‘Just us. The three of us, back together. What did he want you for?’ he said, and then he was murderous, in the same moment when she heard Emme beyond the door, a tiny sound, a footstep taken uncertainly backwards on the stairs. Bez’s hands went to his ears as if he heard it too and he swayed, his head jerked wildly to take in the shelves behind her, the jars, the cookbooks, the plates. ‘He never wanted this, this shit, this shit…’

  And then the door opened behind her and Emme was there, her mouth an o of terror, Silly girl, thought Fran, brave girl, and she reached out a hand to grab Emme’s, holding it fast, and in the same moment brought the other down on the panic button, a quick jab and then withdrawn, before he saw.

  It better have worked, she thought. Only one chance.

  Bez staggered back from her and she pulled Emme close and took hold of her shoulders. She looked into her face. ‘Go back up to bed, Emme,’ she said, keeping her voice level, holding her gaze. ‘We’re just talking. It’s OK.’

  Emme stared back uncertainly, mesmerised, then suddenly she turned and flew, through the door, the sound of her quick feet on the stairs, her door banged. Fran turned back to Bez. He was swaying, on bound and swollen feet, she glimpsed a big gut under the layers of torn and dirty shirt. He took a step towards her and she saw the scale of him, the breadth of his shoulders.

  ‘You killed Nathan,’ she said quietly, setting both hands on the counter behind her to steady herself and talking quietly. He began to shake his shaggy head and a rumble began deep in his chest. ‘Did you mean to do it?’ she said. ‘Was it a mistake?’

  But it couldn’t have been a mistake. Not the violence of it, the knife pulled down through Nathan’s body. It was passion, it was hatred, it was love. If it had been a mistake he would have run away, he would have tried to hide, he wouldn’t have waited, patient, he wouldn’t have staked her out like a deer. The bad man.

  She lifted her hands away from the counter and held them towards him, palms up. She could feel her heart race but all she needed was to keep him there, until they arrived.

  ‘No,’ he said, and his voice was sullen and dangerous. ‘It was you. You did it.’ He lifted his hands between hers and up, to her throat and his reddened eyes told her he was capable of it, he hated her. She reached for them, his forearms like hams, she could get a purchase and he was tightening his grip, she could feel a throb in her temple as the blood supply reduced. She dug in her nails.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she said, her voice clotted with the pressure. ‘Where did you wait for him? If you loved him … those are his kids upstairs. If you loved him…’ How long did he take to die? She didn’t know: her eyes felt as if they were being forced out of her head, she couldn’t see.

  And then suddenly the pressure was gone. She reeled as he lurched away, stumbling against the table, and she saw his cheeks streaked with tears, he didn’t have it in him, after all. A glass tipped, rolled, smashed in front of her, already going after him she trod in it, she felt a stab and the quick hot gush of blood, instantly slippery underfoot. She slid and grabbed, the door flew back, she felt the icy damp of the outside and he was gone.

  She could heard the roar of the engine across the fields as she crouched in the blood and glass but by the time the car crunched up on the gravel it was too late. He was long gone. Too late. For all you know, I’d have been dead. They didn’t seem to care.

  It was DS Gerard, and he was on his own.

  Chapter Thirty

  Had she expected that they would come in pairs? When he had knocked at the back door she was still bleeding. She hobbled to the door at the stern sound of his voice. ‘Mrs Hall? Fran? Are you all right?’

  Doug Gerard stood there in the dark. Beyond him she could see a gleam of white on the shed roof, no more than a dusting. What snow there had been had stopped. He was wearing jeans, trainers, unshaven; he could have been anyone, a dad, a bloke watching the football in the pub, a dating profile. He saw the blood on her hands, on her foot and tutted.

  ‘Just one of you?’ she said, angry suddenly. ‘He’s long gone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Bez.’ He made that sound again, of impatience. ‘He was here,’ said Fran through gritted teeth. ‘He was angry, he…’ She put her hands up to her throat, feeling the tenderness.

  He pushed in past her. ‘May I?’ he said, not waiting for an answer, and he was looking around, taking in the broken glass and the blood on the floor. She remembered what he’d said about staging a crime scene: she had no faith he would believe her.

  ‘Just you?’ she said again.

  ‘Back-up’ll be here in five,’ he said, peremptory. ‘I was nearest. Off-duty, came in my own car but … I like to get the use of the siren.’ Unsmiling. ‘So he’s just gone, this minute?’

  ‘Maybe ten minutes.’ He stepped back out into the yard and she heard him talking. When he came back in his manner was more leisurely.

  He eyed her: bare feet, blood on her jeans. The T-shirt she’d put on for bed, and no bra – could he see that? ‘Sit down,’ he said, brusque. When she stayed where she was he said, ‘The foot.’ Reluctantly she sat down. He tipped washing up out of the bowl and refilled it and set it on the floor beside her.

  ‘We’ll get him,’ he said, lifting her foot into the water. ‘We’ve got the infra-red, helicopters, if it comes to that…’

  ‘Was that who you were talking to? Are they sending out a helicopter?’

  He barely smiled. ‘They don’t come cheap, and it’s not hard to track down a drunk. They move slow, they leave traces, and we know him of old, Mr Beston. He’s got form.’

  ‘But you hadn’t got him.’ His thumb was on her instep. ‘What form has he got?’

  ‘The usual,’ said Gerard dismissively, his head bent over her foot in the water. ‘Drunk and disorderly, causing a disturbance. Affray, but that was the once. A historic caution, but he was a kid.’ He got up, looked under the sink, came back with a clean j-cloth. ‘No violence.’ Carefully, he rolled the leg on her jeans. ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘He said something about a woman, at Black Barn.’ She turned at the thought, she strained to look across the table to the counter, trying to remember. ‘About the three of them being back together.’ Gerard’s hands were on her foot, restraining her. ‘Do you know about Black Barn? He said he loved Nathan.’ She heard herself, emotionless. ‘He said I killed him.’

  He sat back on his haunches, regarding her. ‘I didn’t kill him, you know that.’ She swayed a little in the chair.

  ‘I don’t know that I do,’ he said, and suddenly his voice was so gentle, his hands on her foot were so warm. ‘What do you think your husband was up to? Have you got any idea? Because he wasn’t working as a builder, or site manager, or whatever, was he?’ She just gazed. ‘Where did you think the money was coming from, to pay the bills, to pay the mortgage?’ She began to shake her head. ‘Did you find out? Did you find out what he was using you for, is that why? Or was it your boyfriend?’

  ‘Is that why what?’ she said. Then, too late, ‘I haven’t got a boyfriend. Using me?’

  Gerard stood up. ‘Towel?’ he asked and although she didn’t answer, when her eyes moved there he opened the big cupboard, an old linen press Nathan hadn’t wanted her to buy, too big, too permanent. There they were, her towels
, stacked neat and clean, her old life. Gerard whistled soft admiration, teasing her, and took one down. He knelt again, and lifted her foot out of the water.

  ‘There’s Nick Jason,’ he said. ‘He’s not your boyfriend? You’ve been seen together.’

  ‘Ex,’ said Fran, lifting her foot away from him but he reached for it, wrapped the towel around it. ‘I didn’t know he’d moved out here.’

  ‘If you say so,’ he said mildly, pressing the foot dry. ‘Out here on your own, trying to manage it all, you’re vulnerable, you’re tired.’ He held her ankle, his finger on the soft skin under the cuff of her jeans. ‘Just let me help,’ he said, and then he looked down again and she felt his mouth, his lips on her instep for just a soft second before his head was up and he was sitting back again, as if she’d imagined it.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Fran said. Hearing the faintness in her voice she pulled the foot away from him. The cut was small but deep, dark blood welling up. ‘I can do this,’ she said, pushing the chair back, hobbling to the drawer where they kept plasters. With her back to him she could think straight: Black Barn, what happened there. What she’d found in the attic. There was something connecting them, a thread so fine it might mean nothing, it might only mean, this place. This flat, watery, abandoned land.

  ‘There was something,’ she said, grasping for control. ‘Something I meant to tell you. Where you found Rob’s car. The reservoir’s out there, isn’t it? They used to go there, him and Bez and Rob. From Black Barn. Have you dragged the reservoir?’

  He frowned, put out. ‘It’s a couple of miles from where the car was found.’ He spoke warily. ‘And … divers, all that. It’s a big operation, but yes. The search will be moving to the reservoir first thing tomorrow morning.’

  She swallowed. ‘He was scared, you see. Rob was. Someone died at Black Barn. In Oakenham. Nathan told me Oakenham was lovely, he said I should go there with the kids.’ It didn’t make sense. A place where something horrible had happened. A place where Nick saw her from a bridge. ‘He was insistent. What do you mean about him using me?’ Gerard was watching her, gauging her responses. ‘Why were we here? I don’t understand why he came back if only bad stuff happened here.’

  ‘Maybe he brought you back here,’ said Gerard, and he was at her shoulder, reaching past her to take the plaster from her hand. ‘Maybe he thought there was something in Oakenham for you.’ His head tilted, enquiring. ‘Do you think, for example,’ and his smile said he already knew the answer, ‘do you think he knew you’d met up with your ex again?’ He watched her for a reaction.

  She stared, trying to grasp what he was saying. That the thing that had come into her head sitting there in Nick’s car, her lunatic idea that somehow Nathan had known all along – that it wasn’t just in her imagination? She wasn’t crazy, not paranoid after all – only guilty, in Gerard’s eyes.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she faltered. ‘I didn’t … Nick and I weren’t…’ She thought she felt his hand brush her cheek and she flinched.

  Focus. She’d already asked him about Martin’s missing wife, she should tell him about the thing in the attic but she couldn’t, he was too close, too big, he surrounded her. She pulled the plaster back from his hand. ‘I can manage.’

  ‘Yes, we were aware of what went down at Black Barn, that’s all a long time ago now,’ he said, his jaw set. ‘Kids, that’s all. Your husband doesn’t sound like the kind of man to let a bit of teenage trauma throw him off track.’

  She stared. ‘What would you know,’ she asked, with a kind of creeping apprehension, ‘about what kind of man my husband was?’ She took a limping step away from him and sat heavily, the plaster in her hand, its wrapping already torn. She tried to peel it back but her fingers wouldn’t work properly and he was beside her again.

  ‘I don’t want you here.’ She couldn’t look at him.

  ‘I don’t think you know what you want.’

  Sunday

  It was sleep like she hadn’t had in years, in maybe a decade: warm, black, dreamless fathomless sleep, as if a blanket had been laid over her cage. There. One minute she was under, totally under, she was safe. She wasn’t alone any more.

  And then Ben wailed from the next room and it turned to light as suddenly as if the covers had been lifted off. Fran sat bolt upright. The alarm clock with its red numerals. She blinked. Shit. Eight thirty. Emme? Late, late.

  Her foot hurt, the moment she put it down on the carpet beside the bed, and as she ran along the corridor it started bleeding again. There was blood on the carpet.

  She got to Emme’s door before she realised it was Sunday. Sunday. No school. She leaned back, feeling her heart pound. Ben’s wail had started up again and she hobbled to him. She leaned into the cot and he raised his arms, his face creased.

  He’d have to write a report, when he got back wherever he was going. He could say what he wanted, couldn’t he, and what had he done, anyway, what could she accuse him of? His fingers under the cuff of her jeans. She’d heard a crackle from a police radio as he climbed into his car, he had murmured something into it and laughed. Had there ever even been any back-up?

  She took Ben into bed with her to feed him. Emme’s footsteps pattered soft along the corridor and her face peered in: wordless she climbed into the bed beside Fran.

  There was Ali. She could talk to Ali. She held the phone to her mouth. Gerard had said something about that too, turning in the yard in the dark as he left, something about the girl who cried wolf. ‘You want to wait, you want to wait till you’ve got the wolf by the balls, then you can call for help. Works better that way.’

  Was Ali on her side? She’d seen the way she looked at Gerard, she knew his game. But they were colleagues. It was a closed system. Ben wriggled, struggled against her and for the tiniest flash of a second she understood those women who put everyone in the car and drove it into a reservoir. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought that that was where Rob was, down under the black water somewhere with his tidy car parked in the woods.

  Ben’s suck slowed, he pulled back and gazed up at her.

  Emme was quiet by her side. Quickly, she dialled: it went straight to answerphone.

  Was he in bed, was he asleep? Did he have a woman, a girlfriend, or some kind of casual thing going on? She hung up. The tan tights in the field had held the DNA of a woman with convictions for soliciting. She tapped in a message. 4pm Angel? She still hadn’t put Nick’s number in her address book, but she didn’t need to. Send. Delete. But before she could set the phone down again it rang. Her heart pounding, she answered.

  It was Karen.

  ‘This bloody weather,’ she launched, without preamble. ‘Harry giving me grief because there’s no bloody snow, can you believe it?’ She didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I tell him, it’ll come soon enough, you’ll be sick of it then, it’s slush and dirt and wet socks.’ Fran thought of the neatness and order in Karen’s bungalow, the carpet in the dim hall where photographs hung. ‘Last time a truck jackknifed on the ring road, five dead, people stuck in their cars twelve hours.’ Karen stopped, drew breath. ‘What? What’s happened? Don’t tell me they’ve collared someone, that pair of jokers? Wonders will never cease.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Fran said, laying the phone down carefully. ‘Emme,’ she said cautiously, ‘would you go downstairs and see if you can find the…’ she racked her brains. ‘Your snowboots?’ Emme gazed, trusting. ‘They might be in that cupboard under the stairs.’ Obedient, unquestioning – soon she’d start to question, Fran knew that – Emme slid off the bed and when Fran heard her careful footsteps on the stairs she picked up the phone again.

  ‘I was going to say, let’s get out for a walk,’ said Karen, wary.

  ‘It’s not that…’ Fran hesitated. ‘Gerard was over last night. They know something but they won’t tell me. They seem to think … there’s this guy. Someone I knew a long time ago.’

  ‘Coincidence and a half,’ was all Karen said, drily, when Fra
n finished. There was a silence. ‘How about I come over for that walk, then?’ Karen said finally. ‘Give the kids a run.’

  They were out of the village toward Oakenham and had taken a path down by the bridge that turned into a towpath, Fran walking gingerly on her bandaged foot, the children running on ahead in long frosted grass, before Karen spoke. ‘Did he follow you out here, then, or you follow him? This Nick.’ The fen ran beside them, dead straight into the mist.

  Coming to a halt Fran thrust her hands down into her pockets: she felt something there. ‘He was already here. I didn’t follow him. I would have crossed the road to avoid him for years after it ended.’ She felt Karen’s eyes on her. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said, stubborn. ‘I never talked about Nick. Nathan didn’t know him from Adam.’ And then it came back to her, she and Nathan walking past one of Nick’s boarded up clubs and him asking her, did she miss the excitement.

  ‘Doesn’t mean he didn’t want to know,’ said Karen, brusque. ‘Quiet type, your Nathan, was he, right? But liked things the way he liked them, right? I mean, I didn’t need to meet him to know that, the way you are.’

  Fran stared. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Stories my dad used to come out with, Mum used to tell him to shut up in front of us,’ Karen went on. ‘Nice quiet blokes that wouldn’t say boo to a goose, get the wife followed and first the police know about it is when the suitcase the husband put the body in gets caught in a fen sluice, five years later.’

  Something caught, snagged on Fran’s train of thought, then. She took her hand out of her pocket and opened it for Karen to see. Busty Blonde. A woman in a blonde wig, with her boobs in both hands, thrust up and out. Call Roxie, and a number. She thought of the farmer with his stiff dyed hair and eyes going in different directions, knowing it was up there.

  Up ahead the children were barely visible in the mist, running in circles in the long grass.