The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  Not a bed, but more like the great nest of a filthy bird, occupying most of the floor, heaped and mounded layers, she saw tangled clothes, the ragged corner of a blanket. No one there: he was gone. She turned and there was Nick, his back to her. He was looking at something that had been pinned to the wall. A newspaper cutting. Standing, she saw, Star Student Found Dead, and beside it was a photograph. Two girls in school uniform.

  And it tumbled down around her, falling from the sky. Nathan’s phone number in the list on her kitchen wall, where anyone could see it, where Karen could have seen it, noted it. Emme saying, My auntie’s not dead, my auntie’s not dead. Harry’s auntie. Nathan walking away from Julian Napier to talk to a woman on his phone, the night he died.

  That look in Karen’s eyes.

  She turned and ran, down the splintered wooden stairs in a big cold hallway where the light had once shone green, she ran for the door, and the wide dark outside.

  Ali had got halfway to Chatteris when they bothered to send her a message, curt: See you at the station. On our way back.

  The dual carriageway had been clear. For once they’d got the gritting lorries out, Christ knows they’d had enough warning. Reports were coming in of chaos on the smaller roads, a tanker in a ditch somewhere.

  She called, and got Carswell. The monkey not the organ grinder. ‘You wanna hear what’s going down now,’ he said, jittery and gleeful.

  Ali cut him short. ‘Where are you? I mean, exactly?’

  She waited in the lay-by, just above where they would turn off to get back to the station. Gerard climbed out, as pumped as a gorilla at being given instructions on where to meet, and when, his angry breath clouding as he came for her across the gravel and litter and used condoms dusted with snow.

  She’d left most of the folder in the passenger seat. Would Sadie Watts take the fall for her nicking it? She couldn’t think about that. She had the photo with her, though. The dead girl’s mother, half her hair plastered over her face and hardly able to walk straight, a bleary look of misery at the photographer. A younger woman beside her, face set in wooden fury: the sister. Ali stepped in front of Gerard.

  ‘We’re going to Black Barn,’ he said. ‘You want to come and hold Fran Hall’s hand? Because that’s where she is. With her boyfriend.’

  Holding her ground, Ali lifted the picture up to his face. ‘You recognise her?’ she said. ‘That’s the sister of the girl that overdosed at Black Barn. Seen her anywhere before?’

  He stepped back in a hurry but Carswell came in past him, eager, wiping his nose then reaching for the picture. ‘Never,’ he breathed, up close. ‘Yeah, boss, look at that. Whassername, isn’t it? In her kitchen. That bossy cow, remember. That bitch.’ Trying to please him.

  ‘Karen Johns, as was,’ said Ali. ‘Karen Humphries these days, married, divorced, one kid who happens to be the best mate of Fran Hall’s daughter Emme.’

  She could see the tendons in Gerard’s neck tighten as he took another threatening step.

  ‘You think Nathan Hall knew Karen Johns had befriended his wife? Was offering to help with his kids? You think she’d forgotten the man she held responsible for her sister’s death?’ She shook her head. ‘You’re all the same,’ she said. ‘You’re so busy trying to look the big man to the undercover guys that you can’t see what’s under your own nose.’

  Behind them, hopping from foot to foot, Carswell said, ‘Tell her, boss. Tell her what we found up the reservoir.’

  But Doug Gerard paid him no more attention than a fly. ‘Where did you get that?’ he said, and Ali knew if he could have killed her there and then he would have.

  But in her hand the phone began to ring.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  She was in the ditch.

  Nick had offered to drive her, he’d begged. ‘You can’t go out there on your own, not in this.’ Then when she shook her head, stiff with revulsion, and shoved past him to the door he said, ‘Just take it then. Take the car, it’s got four-wheel drive, it’ll—’ she had snatched the key from him. It wasn’t until she turned off the main road that she realised she hadn’t given him her keys in exchange, he was stuck.

  Fran pumped the accelerator but the wheels spun, the car began to rotate beyond her control. The rear end dropped and the whole thing slid backwards, down, and she was in the ditch. Gasping with panic she battered at the heavy door with her shoulder, at last it gave and she fell out, knee-deep in snow, soaked before she righted herself. She could see the poplars, perhaps half a mile ahead.

  Under snow almost everything else had changed and her bearings were skewed, the light was almost gone, the fields gleamed pale and endless, criss-crossed with black. On the horizon the red eyes of the big wind generators, a mobile mast, too late, too far to help her. And she began to run, towards the line of trees.

  It was nothing like running. With every step she sank, the snow sucked at her, it drenched her. Within yards she couldn’t feel her feet but under her clothes she sweated steadily. Don’t stop. Don’t fall. As she ran she scanned the vista, she tried to triangulate, but the line of the horizon see-sawed crazily with every dipping step. One more landmark was what she needed: where, where? Snowflakes filled the air, they whirled, landed cold on her face.

  This was the road. It almost stopped her in her tracks. This was the road, this was where he … Not he, she. It made no sense: she couldn’t force sense out of it. The car parked under the poplars, the body in the ditch, those were her points of triangulation. Not Bez, because that afternoon, that warm, long-ago Saturday afternoon – when something had drawn her out to the barn, that humming in the night air and the car parked under the trees, watching her wander alone through the house – he had been lying face down, pissed into unconsciousness, in a kids’ playground. Not Bez, because it had been Karen.

  Fran was at the poplars. Panting, she turned and looked across the field. Had that been Karen’s car, parked up in the warm afternoon? Had she sent Harry on a sleep-over so she could watch and wait? She could work out his routines and see that when light fell he would come out, expansive, proprietorial, lord of all he surveyed, to piss in a ditch. So that one day, when the time was right, she could come up to him in the dark and whisper in his ear, I’ve waited twenty years for this. The arrogance of him, coming back here. Fran held still, she focused. There was the dark formless shape of the barn and to one side, her house, in the dark. Their house. There was a light on in her bedroom, there was someone in the window, and as she saw it her heart rate accelerated, and she turned towards the lighted window and she ran.

  ‘She’s not here.’

  On the mobile Doug Gerard sounded frightened, now, almost like he was asking for her help. ‘We haven’t got her.’ The phone wedged under her chin, carefully Ali indicated, pulling in to the lay-by. She was four miles from Cold Fen, and the road was treacherous, a layer of slush under her worn tyres.

  ‘It was Nick Jason she was meeting here,’ Gerard said, panting, the line crackling with interference. Behind him Ali could hear Carswell’s scouse whine, wheedling or accusing someone, you couldn’t tell which. Doug Gerard made a noise in his throat. ‘Jason said she’d gone back to her place,’ he said, fighting to sound like he was in charge. ‘She’d worked out who Karen Johns was and she went haring off after her in Jason’s car, left him high and dry.’

  Not exactly the work of a criminal mastermind, lending your car to a bird, but all the chances to have a go passed before Ali’s eyes: there wasn’t time.

  ‘Is he telling the truth?’

  Gerard’s reply was muttered. ‘I think so.’ Of course he was. It wasn’t Nick Jason who’d bought Fran Hall chocolates, it wasn’t her husband, it wasn’t John Martin, either. And it hadn’t been Martin Beston.

  It had been almost an afterthought, back there in the lay-by with Gerard clenching his fists as he came down on her, Ali staring down at the mobile, number unknown, before killing the call. Carswell piping up, perhaps trying to avert violence, the right i
nstinct for once, and it had worked, give him his due. Gerard had stopped, straightened up. ‘It wasn’t him in the reservoir,’ he said, and she had stared. ‘Not Robert Webster, after all. It was Martin Beston.’

  And the phone in her hand had begun to ring again.

  It had been Lindsay, from the shop on Oakenham high street that sold pink glass and Valentine’s crap. Yes, the girl had said, quite pleased with herself, she remembered the customer quite well, her cheerful certainty on the other end of the line in her safe little shop so at odds with the black lay-by and trucks hissing past through the slush and Carswell’s white little ferret face looking properly scared, at last.

  ‘Tall gentleman,’ Ali repeated, and Lindsay babbled on.

  ‘Slim,’ she said. ‘In an anorak, not the usual romantic type but you can never tell. Turned up on a mountain bike, would you believe, thirty pounds those chocolates cost.’

  Ali had barely hung up before Gerard and Carswell had reached their own conclusions. ‘She was meeting someone at Black Barn,’ Gerard said, yanking at the car door. ‘Come on. Black Barn? Got to be him, hasn’t it?’

  Shame you didn’t think of it earlier, Ali didn’t say, but all the time her own instincts taking her somewhere else. Those kids, that house. Family liaison. ‘I’m going to her place,’ she said, and they’d roared off, barely correcting a skid on the road surface like an ice rink now. One-track, one-note, one-way: Doug Gerard and Ed Carswell not capable of executing a U-turn if their lives depended on it. And now they were stuck out in Black Barn and she was still four miles from Cold Fen. She checked her mirrors, indicated.

  Got to be him, hasn’t it?

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Along the top of frozen ruts where the snow lay lighter Fran ran, dodging. The ditch appeared but by then she had worked out where she could cross it and she turned, gauging her angle and unhesitating because there wasn’t time for it. All this time she had thought the threat was outside, watching her, and all the time it was inside. Karen holding Emme’s hand, standing at Fran’s sink. Karen taking her chance, how many months ago, to run her eye down the numbers on the wall by the phone and take Nathan’s. The last one to talk to him.

  The house moved into line, behind the barn; she could see through the barn to its oblique elevation, a bedroom window as she went on running. It blocked her view and she was there on the barn’s edge, a girder beside her and the empty space looming. And then she stopped: then she found she couldn’t move.

  It didn’t fit, though. Karen had been in her kitchen … but in her bedroom? Flowers, chocolates, a Valentine’s card. She hadn’t imagined those things. A man’s hand on her from behind, in the bed. A man pushing himself inside her. Had that been in her head? She hadn’t imagined the condom.

  There was something there. She stood very still, she held her breath and she heard it before she saw anything, something ragged, stifled. Then she looked, she turned her head very slowly. Something insubstantial hung in the dusty darkness, it dangled, drifting, she couldn’t make it out, and then she could. A length of empty rope, a box below it, on its side and as she tried to understand it he stepped out beside her, a ghost, brought up from underwater. ‘You,’ she said. ‘Rob.’ He was all angles and shadows, no flesh on him, his skin raw. He gazed at her, his eyes in the gaunt face huge and liquid.

  ‘We meant to do it together,’ he told her.

  ‘Who?’ she whispered. ‘Do what?’ But she knew: the reservoir swam behind her eyes, the dark water, and a body trapped in the depths.

  ‘Me and Bez,’ he said, gasping. ‘He came out there last night, late. I’d told him where I’d be if he wanted me and I waited for him there.’

  ‘The police were searching the woods,’ she said, numbly, and he just looked at her blank.

  ‘Were they?’ he said, lost. ‘I saw no one.’ He was shivering, and she thought of a leather jacket, left behind in someone’s shed. ‘I couldn’t go home,’ he said, as if reading her mind. ‘I watched him go in the water, he was so tired, he said someone gave him a lift half the way then he’d walked. He was pissed and he just lay back, he put his arms out and let himself go down. But then I couldn’t do it. I had to come back for you.’ A sound came out of him, low down, and he swayed as if it had hurt him.

  ‘It was you,’ she said, and her hands went out, almost without her volition, to hold him. ‘You killed Nathan.’ His head went down towards her, as if to nuzzle, she could smell his skin, a tainted chemical smell. She held firm, keeping him where he was.

  ‘He had said he’d go with me, to Wales.’ His voice eddied, welled, a child about to cry. ‘Way back he promised and then he blew me out, last minute. That’s when I told him, the reason I wanted him to come was I had information. I told him Nick Jason knew all about it, I told him you knew too, you were planning to take it to the newspapers, the two of you. I told him he’d better find a safe place for his hard drive.’

  ‘Nick didn’t know,’ she whispered.

  He stroked her hair. ‘He wouldn’t give it to Napier, I knew that,’ he said.

  And a hardness crept in. ‘Nathan would never let Napier think he’d screwed up. So I told him,’ and his voice lowered, confidential, ‘I won’t go to Wales, we’ll meet in Oakenham instead. Just give it to me, I’ve got a place for it. He trusted me, you see. Because I was always there, waiting to be told, he thought I was his, I would always be his.’

  ‘His hard drive,’ she said and her heart jumped, she had to see it. What he had said about her. ‘His mobile.’

  He stilled, focused. ‘I kept them for you,’ he said and in a jerky imitation of his old self, his shy, methodical self, he turned, searched, patted low down in the darkness. ‘There.’ Something was mounded at the foot of the nearest girder, where he must have been waiting. His mountain-biker’s backpack and the bike itself resting against it, lying on its side. And then he was so close she could almost feel the stubble on his chin, the tears on his cheeks.

  ‘I was at the Angel, that night,’ he said, his breath on her neck. ‘I was waiting outside, I followed him to where I told him to meet me, I watched. I’m good at watching.’ She gasped, a sob of terror, and swallowed it. ‘I can wait as long as you like,’ he said, his lips moving against the soft place under her ear.

  ‘I can’t, Rob, I can’t…’ but he didn’t seem to hear.

  He pulled away, looking down at her. His cheekbones sharp, the eyes just wells of shadow. ‘He came out, he was on his phone. I heard him talking to a woman. “You bitch,” he said. Walking up and down in the car park.’

  ‘Karen,’ she said.

  ‘She was making him angry,’ Rob muttered into her neck. ‘I knew it wasn’t you. You never got angry, no matter what he did.’ And he held her tighter, tighter, till it hurt. ‘You’re like me. He looked for people like us.’

  There was a name for people like Nathan. She’d read somewhere, a psychopath knows you from behind, the way you walk. He can see your weakness, your need. She tried not to struggle, to save her strength.

  ‘What did he do to you?’ she said. ‘What did they do, him and Napier? At Black Barn?’ Rob’s head went up and his eyes looked into hers, they seemed filmed over, opaque and dead. ‘Nathan?’ he said, wondering. ‘At Black Barn he said, just let them do what they want to you. He said, take the money. Take the dope. He said, it doesn’t mean anything.’ His head swung away, she saw his eyes roaming, empty, across the dark flat land. The sound broke from him again. ‘I tried. Worse for Bez, because he loved Nathan, and I hated him, I was just waiting … waiting…’ The words seemed to choke him, he gasped for air. ‘I tried. I sat there at the table with them, him and Napier, when you got married. I tried. To pretend it didn’t mean anything.’ He couldn’t even say it: sex. She thought, unwillingly, of sex with Nathan, of his fastidious movements, his disdain.

  ‘It was you I needed,’ he said, and his hands were on her cheeks.

  ‘You were in my bed,’ Fran said. She could see his face wet in the distan
t gleam from the house, and hoped he couldn’t hear the uncontrollable thing that climbed up inside her. She wondered if they would come. If they would be in time. Somewhere she found her voice. ‘You can’t do that,’ she said, loud, wanting them to hear. All of them. ‘You raped me.’ He flinched.

  He pulled his head back, to avoid her eye, No, I … no, I… but she held him there. ‘He had you, you see?’ he said. ‘Do you see?’ What she saw were his eyes on her in that Italian restaurant after the wedding, as Nathan’s hand clapped him on the shoulder. Stiffly, she nodded. ‘I wanted you.’ Now his voice was different, not lost, sad Rob but an angry child, an angry boy who would do what he wanted. Would take what he wanted, and smash it.

  ‘He told me, “We’re nearly there.” He’d nearly nailed you both. “She’s fucking him again. She’s just like all the rest.”’ Rob’s voice was choked with something, rage or misery. ‘Nick Jason. Your drug-dealer boyfriend.’ But when he spoke again it was flat. ‘You were so kind. You were so gentle. I saw the way you looked at Nathan, more and more, trying to understand why he’d married you. I could have told you why.’

  ‘He married me to get to Nick,’ she said dully. ‘Five years, on the offchance.’

  ‘You were part of it,’ said Rob. ‘You were a gamble, a side-bet. They were conducting a big undercover operation to get to – to him, that had nothing to do with you. You were Nathan’s little private game.’ His voice was thin, reedy with misery. He couldn’t even bring himself to say Nick’s name.

  ‘It’s not true,’ she said. ‘What he said about me and Nick Jason. It’s not true,’ but Rob didn’t seem to hear. ‘What was he going to do next,’ she said, insistent, ‘if I had been sleeping with Nick?’

  ‘He was going to have his fun,’ said Rob, turning his head slightly, not to look into her face. ‘He said, she’ll feel so guilty, I know her inside out, she’ll torture herself. I’ll wait till she’s ready to top herself then I’ll show her how she can make it better. She can get information on Nick Jason for me.’ Then Rob turned back and his face was so close to hers again she could feel the brush of stubble. ‘He owned us. If he wanted to nail us to the floor there would be nothing we could do about it, we could twist and turn but we’d only hurt ourselves. Me and you. I couldn’t let him.’ In the dark she put her hands on his shoulders. ‘He called you a stupid cow,’ he said, his voice wondering, rising to anger again.