The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  ‘No,’ Fran said in the dim pub. ‘I don’t think it was him.’

  Thorney leaned back against the wall, satisfied. She hadn’t been able to say why she was so sure. There was a reason in there somewhere, something to do with that afternoon when she’d walked out to the barn, with Emme finding him face down in a kids’ playground. ‘Do you know where he is now?’ she asked. ‘Bez. Where’s he living?’ and Thorney looked at her, his old face tired, mild, forgiving.

  ‘There were others,’ he said. ‘There were men going there for sex, for a hit, or just to drop out, people who wouldn’t have liked it to be known, let’s say. People who could hit you harder than that soft kid ever could, and make sure you stayed down.’

  ‘Like … police?’

  ‘You didn’t hear it from me,’ said Thorney, tipping his glass to see the level in it, half full now, carefully setting it back on the ledge. ‘I don’t know why he’d want to go back there, all considered. Sometimes, sometimes … no matter what the damage is, you go back to what you know.’

  ‘Bez is at Black Barn?’ But he didn’t answer, he just leaned back to look around the pillar, at Eric behind the bar.

  She waited, as long as she could. ‘So who,’ she said finally, ‘did Nathan meet in here?’

  He turned back then, studying her. ‘Huh,’ he said finally. ‘He’d chat to whoever. But you know what I noticed? He never left with anyone, so you got it right, it weren’t for that kind of action he came. More gay than straight, maybe, but not too interested either way. Interested in something else, you get to know them. It could be fetish, it could be power games.’ Smiled. ‘Or could be vice. You know, police.’ A knowing look. ‘They think we don’t know them. See ’em a mile off.’ She nodded. ‘Anyway. Al just sat and waited. Some would chat, once or twice I saw him slip cash across. That happens, you don’t ask who’s being paid for what. But that last night – I’d seen them together before, him and the big man, didn’t look the usual punter but one thing you learn is don’t judge a book by its cover. They went back a way, you could tell, your husband and that one.’

  An idea formed. ‘You told the police about this big man?’ she asked. Thorney nodded. ‘And I told them about the briefcase.’

  ‘Yes?’ Fran leaned forward and he allowed himself another sip. ‘The big bloke thought Al should give him the briefcase, one of them nylon things, not leather, but Al was shaking his head, I heard him say something like he was too close, it wasn’t safe. Something about having a safe home for it. Had it with him when he left.’

  ‘Old, young?’ she said. ‘The other man.’

  ‘Old,’ said Thorney, fastidious. ‘Or getting there. Upper crust. Plenty of them types like it rough and they got money to pay for a younger man.’

  ‘He was called Julian,’ she told him. ‘I think he knew Nathan from Black Barn.’

  Thorney shrugged, eyes sliding away. ‘If you say so,’ he said.

  ‘Did they leave together?’ Thorney shook his head. ‘I told the police. He left the fat bloke ordering another pint. He left quick. Looking at his phone on the way out.’

  She slid off the bar stool, and he looked at her in surprise. ‘Got what you came for, then?’ he said and she nodded, but her mind was moving on, ahead, and she was gone, off through the gloom and out into the cold, her thumb already scrolling down through the numbers. She must have known, somehow, because she’d copied the number across from where she’d seen it, there by the phone on the kitchen wall. Julian Napier.

  New message. Nick, Nick, Nick.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A phone couldn’t hold battery in this wilderness. Fran pictured it exhausting itself, seeking a signal across the wastes, dodging silos and windfarms. Twenty per cent should hold out: it was just Ben she was worried about. Would he wake and look up at Miranda’s face and think, it’s a stranger, after all?

  She should never have left them.

  Miranda had been insistent. ‘We’ll be fine,’ she said. On the shelf were two feeding bottles, never used. Fran had taken them down, doubtful. ‘Karen’s given him formula, when she’s had him.’ Karen’s gleaming kitchen, her steriliser.

  ‘How hard can it be?’ said Miranda, robustly. ‘And I need to get to know him. My nephew.’

  ‘I’ll be an hour,’ Fran had said. All she’d told Miranda was, she was going to the Angel in the Fields, to speak to the last man who’d seen Nathan. ‘Maybe two, at the outside. I’ve just got to do this. I can’t trust the police to do it.’ Ali Compton had said, Go nowhere. See no one.

  But Miranda had nodded. ‘I wouldn’t trust them to find their own backsides, if it was a woman giving them directions.’

  And now it was snowing properly.

  Julian’s number had rung a long time. Perhaps he was at home, in the country, with a wife and dogs and a tennis court. Then he answered.

  ‘Mrs Hall.’ Julian’s voice had been jovial, reassuring, sombre, but now she knew, she heard something else.

  ‘You don’t need to keep up the pretence,’ she said, and he was in, smooth.

  ‘It’s grief,’ he said. ‘It’s bereavement, Fran.’

  She had cut in then, hard. ‘I’m not grieving, because I know. I know what you were doing, you and him, I know you saw him the night he died.’

  ‘Be careful, Fran,’ the man said quietly. ‘About what you think you know.’

  ‘I know he had the hard drive of his computer. Where is it now? What was on it? He brought me here, to this … this horrible place.’ Because as she said it Fran saw that was what it was, the house standing stiff and unloved on the wide plain, the panelling painted over, the high ceilings stained and cobwebbed. ‘He was using me, to get to Nick, he knew he’d come out here. He targeted me, none of it was real, not to him. Marrying me, our children … we have children.’ Her voice broke, but there was only stony silence, and she knew it was true. ‘All the details of his … his … what would you call it? His operation? Is that what would be on that computer? His undercover activities. What makes you think, what makes you think you have the right…’ She stopped.

  ‘If you think,’ Julian’s voice was steely now, and she registered that there was no background noise, nothing, as though he was in a soundproofed room, a secure line, she thought, of course, ‘if you think that this display convinces me, if you’re trying to threaten me by withholding that hard drive—’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ she said, almost euphoric to think that she had wrong-footed him. ‘I don’t know what safe place he had in mind for it, but I don’t know where it is.’

  ‘I heard you,’ Julian had said, then, his voice very cool, very precise. ‘Why do you think you are being investigated? Why do you think those police officers are so certain it was you? You telephoned him while he was there with me, the night he died. A woman’s voice.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said, but Julian didn’t seem to hear.

  ‘A difficult conversation, by the look of his face when he returned. I’d never seen him look so pale. You called him.’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ she said, and Julian sighed.

  ‘Can you really be so naive?’ he said. ‘We don’t dedicate five years to pursuing a man for nothing, you know.’ Then something gave him pause, it entertained him. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘there’s always the possibility that Nick Jason had got wind of something himself and he was using you to find out about our operation, isn’t there?’ And hearing him almost entertained she heard her breathing rise, ragged.

  ‘Can you really,’ Julian said, hearing her on the brink, ‘not have known what kind of man Nick Jason is? What kind of things he’s done?’ And then, with a click, he had hung up.

  Pulling into a lay-by she got out her phone again. Through the windscreen the big flakes drifted soft and innocent and harmless, blurring the hedges. A car came by, the hiss of slush under its tyres.

  She squinted at the phone’s map one last time before closing it to save battery. Ferry Lane, Nick’s message had said. N
ext left. Another car, this time with headlights on, and in a panic her mind whirred, just how late was it?

  But her phone said 14.15. She’d been gone an hour and twenty minutes. She dialled home.

  I’ll be fine with them, Miranda had said with Ben on her arm, looking round the kitchen. Assessing the situation as Emme peered around the door at her new aunt, fascinated. I’ll be fine.

  It rang and in her head she saw the phone on the wall and the house, the dishes on the draining board, she almost hung up before she could imagine Ben’s face, what if he was unhappy, what if he was howling— ‘Hello?’

  There was no background noise, she could detect nothing but cheerfulness in Miranda’s voice, but then, how would she know? They were strangers. ‘Is he all right?’ she said, high-pitched with anxiety. ‘Still asleep,’ said Miranda, brisk. ‘Your friend Karen came and got Emme, said something about Sunday school. How about you?’

  Sunday school? Karen? But Fran didn’t have time to wonder about Karen’s hidden depths.

  ‘Half an hour,’ she said. ‘I’m … I’m pretty much on my way back.’ Don’t tell her. Don’t think about it. Nick, Nick, Nick: you’d never hurt me, would you, Nick? She had to know, though.

  A gritting lorry rumbled by, flecking the car. ‘I don’t want to get caught in this snow,’ she said, and the tick of impatience set up, Come on, come on. ‘Is everything OK? You haven’t … nobody’s come round?’

  ‘Yes, no, everything’s fine. It’s just … well. It gives me the creeps, maybe, being back here. Half recognising people, from way back. Faces, voices.’ A strained sound. ‘We’ll sit tight.’

  She turned down Ferry Lane. It was narrow and overgrown, she glimpsed a churned field behind the bedraggled, snow-dusted hedge, a tumbledown prefab, a patch of trees, and the road ran out. A gate. Carefully she turned the car in the narrow space, handbrake on, lights off.

  I think I’ve found what you’re looking for, Nick’s message said. And here she was.

  She climbed out of the car and immediately the softly whirling snow found her, it was in her hair, it crept cold under her collar, it settled on her shoulders. She could see the shape of a dark building through the tangled thicket of overgrown trees ahead of her. There was no other car, but she could see a lopsided gate in the undergrowth, and she went towards it.

  The snow muffled everything, there was no sound, it seemed, at all. She could smell the river. She pushed the gate open. ‘Nick?’ She listened, but there was still nothing.

  What things he’s done. I know some, she had wanted to say to Julian, I’m not innocent. She thought of the way Nick had looked down at Ben’s small head, He needs a father, he’d said, but it was Emme’s face she saw then. Emme solemn, Emme scared, Emme sitting up with nightmares. You’re not a father, Nick.

  Someone killed Nathan. And then it was as though it all narrowed and she was looking down on that black land, flat and sodden, at his body head down in the winter grass, it bypassed her bedroom, a man climbing warm and heavy into the bed beside her, it left that behind, that was the distraction. A knife pulled up through a human body, leaving it to bleed out into the slime and ditch water, that was where she needed to look. You wouldn’t hurt me, Nick?

  She was at the front of the house. There was a splintered wooden veranda, a porch half collapsed under the weight of tangled leafless creeper where snow caught and clung, a door buckled with damp. Something gathered inside her, her heart ready to race as she put her hand to the door and pushed, and it gave.

  The carers were in. Ali sat in the car with the folder in her lap. She couldn’t go back inside and look at it. She had a different head on once she walked in through the back door and saw Mum’s kitchen, the aluminium pans one inside the other, scratched from years of Brillo pads, the glass figures on the window sill behind the sink. She wouldn’t be able to think straight for listening to what they were doing upstairs, were they being kind.

  Something had stopped her in the kitchen, on the way back out to the car. Something Fran Hall had said, about flowers, and Valentines and chocolates. She’d gone to the cupboard where she’d put them, wondering as she reached for the door if Mum might have found them, put them out for the bin men or eaten them all one after the other, but there it was, the plastic carrier bag. Receipt still in there, too.

  It wasn’t even four in the afternoon but it was dark and she had to turn on the light to see what she was looking at. A shop in Oakenham that sold knick-knacks, pink glass and mirrors and little pots for dressing tables but every February they got in fancy chocolates. Twenty-nine ninety-nine. Pricey. There was a phone number.

  The cardboard folder sat on her knee. She dialled the number on the receipt and when it rang and rang she thought, Shit, it’s Sunday, but then a dozy-sounding lad answered. Well, it was Valentine’s, maybe they thought it was worth opening. ‘Yes,’ she repeated when he began to stutter, ‘the police.’ He hadn’t been in on Saturday last, he said, for which she inwardly thanked providence, that had been Lindsay and should he get Lindsay to call? They’d hardly sold any of those chocolates, she’d remember. ‘Yes, get Lindsay to call.’

  She lifted the folder to the light, the cardboard was soft with age. Plus she hadn’t wanted it in the house, in Mum’s house.

  There was a two-page report on the girl’s death. Accidental overdose, heroin plus alcohol. Interviews with Martin Beston and Robert Webster; Webster the one who called an ambulance, Beston was found unconscious in another room, had his stomach pumped. No mention of Alan Nathan Hall. Psych reports, social services reports, on Beston and Webster, no more than perfunctory, just reading them made Ali feel something hard as a stone in her gut. No one cared where they’d gone next, whether they scrambled out like Rob Webster, or lay there battered and bleeding, like Martin Beston.

  It’s better now, she told herself. We do more for them now. But now was too late.

  She turned the page, almost at the end, and there, barely even a footnote, was a photograph of the family of the dead girl, arriving at the inquest.

  When the mobile rang, she assumed it would be him, Nick. She was standing in the cavernous hall, just beginning in the half-dark to make out the space. It stank. Not river water, not mould or damp, dead leaves in corners: it stank of human waste and rotten food.

  It was Doug Gerard.

  ‘I called the house,’ he said, his voice cold. ‘Where are you? Is Ali Compton there? Christ knows what she’s playing at, chasing us round the country. There’s been a development. More than one.’

  ‘Is it Nick?’ she said, and when she heard his hard laugh she regretted it.

  ‘“Is it Nick?”’ he mocked. ‘We’ll come to Nick Jason in due course.’ The line jumped and cut out. She held the phone away from her and saw the tiny icon that told her how much battery she had left was nothing but a sliver of red. In the silence she heard something, through the arched window, the sound of a car in the lane behind the house.

  Then Gerard’s voice crackled back at her and she put it back to her ear. ‘I’m at Black Barn,’ she said, ‘I’m meeting—’ But he cut out again.

  ‘What?’ she said, covering her other ear with her hand. ‘What?’

  Fran held the phone away from her but the screen was black.

  The door opened. ‘Frankie,’ said Nick, and for a second she saw, through the door behind him, how white it was in the outside world and then he closed it.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The look on his face as he came inside: fear and disgust. Why had he brought her here?

  ‘Christ,’ said Nick. ‘That smell.’ Then his arms were around her, and it was his smell in her nostrils, his familiar smell. It must have been him – her body would have known a stranger, she would have rolled over in the bed, she would have woken and screamed and stopped him.

  (And what would have happened then? her logical mind asked her, and then would he have killed you, the stranger?)

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, and she felt him stiffe
n, wary. ‘What?’ he said and she shifted ground.

  ‘Why did you ask me here?’ she said. He stood back from her, holding her by the elbows.

  ‘You wanted to find this place, right? I found it for you. I thought we could…’ He faltered. ‘I don’t know. Look around, see if—’

  ‘They were after you, Nick,’ she said. ‘Those suitcases you bought me in Amsterdam. Were you bringing stuff into the country in them?’

  He shook his head, uneasy. ‘It was a one-off, I was never … I didn’t deal, I didn’t buy the stuff. I was out of my depth.’

  ‘Liar,’ she said, holding her ground. ‘They don’t put undercover surveillance on someone for five years – five years, of my life, five years, two children – they don’t do that for nothing.’

  He was pale, defeated. ‘I was a fucking idiot. You know me, Frankie. I just wanted the clubs, I didn’t know the drugs were going to … people were after me to let that happen. It got out of control.’ She said nothing. ‘Maybe they knew I would have done anything to get you back.’ She held his gaze, seeing how lost he’d been, without her. Then he looked away.

  ‘All right,’ he mumbled. ‘All right. I’m still in it. I’m still moving stuff, still selling. I’d stop in a second if you asked me, though. If you’d come back.’ Pleading; begging.

  ‘Did you kill Nathan, Nick?’ But before she’d finished the question she knew the answer, faltering, grappling, it must have been him, only him, in her bed. But it hadn’t been.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ he said, his voice falling away. ‘Kill a man? Knife him? I mean, you’re kidding, right?’ He put his face close to hers. ‘Frankie, please.’ She pulled away from him and pushed the door open, into the bedroom.