The Loving Husband (18 page)

Fran heard him make a surly sound, and he said something she didn’t catch. Then, ‘I want to be back here in half an hour.’

She heard a car door slam, the ignition fire, wheels beginning to reverse over the gravel. Her own car was sitting on the drive, no longer blocked in, she could climb in and drive. Half an hour, to escape. But there was Emme, there was Ben, they were hers, she was theirs, two days in a row she’d given them to Karen and she needed to get them back. She squinted at the sky to gauge the time: the sun was dipping again. Time to start again, dealing with it.

Inside the house the landline began to ring.

Fran straightened, her legs already starting to stiffen. She came out from behind the fence in a hurry but before she got to the door she could hear that the phone had stopped ringing. As she tried the door, registering that it was still unlocked, there was DC Ed Carswell standing by the phone she’d used to call the ambulance, with the smear of blood still on the wall beside his head.

She saw him take her in, his eyes moving up and down, checking her out in the running gear, the tight leggings – and with her anger the world rearranged itself around her, it parted for her. She walked straight up to him and held out her hand for the phone. Carswell gave it to her.

‘Nice legs,’ he said, smiling. He didn’t bother to lower his voice. There was no one to hear, after all.

Gerard screeched up on the forecourt of one of the light industrial units of the Sandpiper estate, coming to a halt so suddenly Ali was thrown forward in the seat. He turned to look at her, lairy, hoping for her to have a go. ‘I’m too old, DS Gerard,’ she said, ‘to be impressed by a boy racer.’

‘You’re too old for all sorts of things,’ he said, and shouldered his door open. ‘Not my idea of a hot date, this.’

Ali remembered the Sandpiper being built. It had been nothing more than a collection of ramshackle sheds and lock-ups for years, dodgy as you like but almost part of the landscape, tucked in the lee of a field and a lay-by. Then the land-grab craziness drifted out from Cambridge and it was all retail units and get rich quick, a mish-mash of cut-and-shut cowboys, storage and office units.

On the other side of the road a mechanic eyed them from over the bonnet of a truck, the unit next to him had a long shutter with a big silver sign saying
Club Sound Logistics
. ‘Come on, if you’re coming,’ said Gerard behind her.

He let them in through an anonymous door with frosted glass, not even a nameplate, she didn’t know how he had the key but it was probably by chucking his weight around. He went in ahead of her, pushed open a flimsy internal door.

Ali looked around. A cheap veneer table in a corner with a telephone on it, two of the usual padded office chairs, a bookcase with a couple of handbooks on building and design regulations and a well-thumbed paperback, some lads’ airport book about black ops, embossed lettering.

‘He was actually paying rent on it?’ Gerard shrugged, nodding, working up to something. ‘There’s nothing here,’ she said. Gerard’s grin told her he was pleased that Nathan Hall had got one over on the wife, lying to her, keeping her in the dark. ‘So it’s a … what?’ she said. ‘A front?’

He was looking at her. ‘You’re the smart one, DC Compton, you tell me.’

‘Drugs?’ said Ali, and he turned away from her and went to the window, one of those that only opened a crack, with dusty vertical blinds across it. He put a finger to one of the slats, pulling it open.

‘So your theory is?’ She was talking to his back. Silence, hands in pockets: it almost sounded like he was whistling.

‘Well,’ said Doug Gerard, eyeing her over his shoulder, half a smile on his face. ‘Working from home’s no life for a bloke, is it? He could have just wanted to get away from her and those snotty kids.’ Trying to wind her up; Ali just stared back. ‘Or there might be something out here he was interested in,’ he said then, the smile going cold. ‘Or someone.’

‘You think he was shagging the nice lady who runs the softplay centre?’ she said. She came up to the window, putting a foot at least between them, and looked through the slats, where he was looking. The mechanic was wiping his hands on a rag, staring across the road. ‘Or was he the kind that likes a bit of rough trade on the side? I thought it was her you had fingered for playing away.’

‘Getting warmer, DC Compton,’ he said, sarcastic.

Gets him going, she thought, the thought of other people shitting on each other. Is that because of the job? You see too much of it.

‘So what exactly did DC Watts find out?’ was all she said. ‘Sadie. I heard you had her on Fran Hall’s case, who she’s been seen with, what she’s been getting up to.’ He grinned, knowing. ‘If she’s been getting up to anything, that is,’ she said stiffly.

‘Ah, Sadie. Little Sadie. I’m looking forward to that debrief.’ She resisted the urge to knee him in the nuts. Undignified, that would be, but worth it. One day. She waited.

‘Seen with a man,’ he said, pursing his lips. ‘I told you.’

‘It’s not a crime to talk to a man in the street. It’s not like Sadie Watts has found hotel records or saw them up against a wall. She got nothing.
Nothing
.’

‘Come on,’ said Doug Gerard, ‘it’s written all over her, you know that as well as I do. We done here, then, DC Compton?’

She folded her arms. ‘After you,’ she said as he went for the door.

‘Shagging someone else,’ he said, turning around again just as she came after him. ‘I told you. You get a feel for that kind of thing.’

‘If I catch you feeling any kind of thing,’ Ali said, staring back at him, ‘between you and me, I’ll have you at a tribunal before you can check your bollocks are still where you left them.’

He was still laughing as he stood at the passenger door and held it open for her. She yanked it out of his hand. ‘Let’s just get back to protecting the public, shall we?’ he said, giving her that face.

‘If you can remember how to do that,’ she said, and slammed the door, missing his fingers by millimetres. At least she saw him jump.

‘Hello?’ Fran said into the phone, looking at Ed Carswell stonily until he turned, unabashed, and away. She watched him wander down the hall into their sitting room and she closed the door.

‘Mrs Hall? This is Julian Napier.’

The voice was immediately familiar, rich and gravelly, upper-class.

‘Julian,’ she said, and all at once implications were dumped back in her life: she was going to have to tell people. Tell this man.

‘Is, ah, is Nathan there?’ His cheeriness slightly forced. ‘Been trying to get him on the mobile phone.’

She had to tell Emme.

The bedside clock had said four when Fran left the bedroom to come downstairs, and outside the light was almost gone. Tuesday: a future stretched ahead, weekends alone with the children in the cold rooms. Sunday would be Valentine’s Day.

After hanging up she’d marched into the sitting room. Carswell had been loitering there in the gloom, flicking through a book on the side. ‘If you don’t mind staying in the kitchen,’ Fran heard herself say. He’d put his hands in his pockets and nodded, like a schoolboy.

‘You can wipe that, now,’ Carswell said as they stepped into the kitchen, pointing at the smear on the wall by the phone. ‘We’ve got a shot of it.’ She closed the door on him.

She’d stood in the shower for ten minutes, scrubbing at herself. She’d heard voices downstairs but stayed put.

The only time Fran was in this house without the children was when Nathan took them out, on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, an hour, maybe two at some park or other. It seemed bigger up here, without them. She was aware of the small noises, birds, mice, spiders, aware of the big dark roof space above her head.

She’d give it half an hour then she’d call Karen.

All three of the police officers were in the kitchen, the men standing, Ali Compton at the table. Carswell avoided Fran’s eye when she came through the door.

She was wearing a big jumper of Nathan’s, old jeans, trainers. She’d stood in front of the wardrobe for a long time: grey, black, white, stuff stretched out of shape and faded. In the back, out of sight, was a new dress. She never wore dresses any more. She’d bought it a month ago.

She reached over to Nathan’s side and pulled things at random towards her face: the sleeve of a suit jacket, but all it smelled of was the dry cleaner’s. Out of the corner of her eye the dress appeared, in plain sight. Nathan must have spotted it, but he had said nothing.

Ali was sitting at the table: it had been cleared, a stack of papers neat on the dresser. There was another pot of tea. Fran didn’t sit down.

‘I didn’t dream it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t imagine it, I didn’t get the time wrong. It was after midnight when someone came in here, into the house, and if Nathan was killed at eleven at the latest…’ and she paused, to let them know she didn’t care if they knew she’d overheard them, ‘then it wasn’t Nathan.’

There was a long silence, and then Gerard spoke into it, and she heard triumph.

‘Right, now we’re getting somewhere.’

She’d thought the sex would get better. But it was too late by then. By then, Fran fancied him, and her judgement was skewed. And what had drawn her was that lightness in him, the refusal to be pinned down. Hard to get.

A week after that first time, they went to see a film together and Nathan invited Fran up to his place. Methodically he took off her clothes and led her into his bedroom. He didn’t get hard straight away, and she didn’t know why, it felt like a reproach straight off, even when he smiled, sat back on the pillows, when he said, ‘Why don’t you see what you can do,’ looking down at her, cool as you like. He had lain there, the light still on, and she had put her hand between his legs and touched him, she felt the soft weight of him. She leaned down and put his heavy cock in her mouth and then she knew it would work, at least, it did work, she had been obedient, and was rewarded. Of course, she couldn’t stop herself wondering, then, and later, what if it hadn’t, what then? Try harder.

She made sure she never went near the club, anywhere she might see Nick, or think about him. And then she was pregnant.

Why don’t you see what you can do.
She’d forgotten that, forgotten crouching on the bed between his legs and his hand guiding her head down. The light staying on, when she wanted it off. When she had resisted for just a second and looked up she had caught a look on his face that she’d forgotten too: a remote, curious look as if she was a game, an experiment. When he smiled that look was gone, as if it had never been, but it had been.

You work it out, don’t you? What marriage is all about.

Fran waited for them to ask – how would they phrase it?
Did you
have relations?
– but they didn’t. The possibility sat in her head, it hummed like a great sinister engine hidden away, in a cellar, in a basement. She told them he’d come to bed, that was all – then backtracking, helpless,
But I might have dreamed it, after all –
she told them she’d gone back to sleep.

Gerard told her they’d send the team back in, in the morning, to check the bedroom. She didn’t tell them that the sheets she’d slept in were dry and folded and put away: it seemed too late to tell them that. She felt dog-tired, as if the adrenalin had drained her.

‘Ed said someone called,’ said Gerard, pacing now in the kitchen, like an animal. ‘Asking after your husband?’ It looked to her like he hadn’t shaved, his chin was dark with stubble.

‘That’s right,’ she said wearily, not even surprised that he already knew. ‘A business contact. Julian Napier, Napier Construction. He said he’d been trying Nathan’s mobile.’

The name stopped Gerard’s pacing. ‘Napier Construction,’ he repeated, interested. ‘Upmarket. Is that … you’ve met him?’

‘He was at our wedding,’ she said, shortly. ‘Look—’

‘It wasn’t Mr Webster, then?’ Probing. ‘On the phone.’

‘You mean Rob?’ There was an insinuation in his voice that she didn’t quite understand. Then she did.

‘Rob’s Nathan’s friend, not mine,’ she said, sharply, angry on his behalf, Rob. Rob, with a sob in his voice, mourning. ‘Have you spoken to him? You don’t know Rob.’

‘No,’ said Gerard, reasonably. ‘That’s true. In answer to your question, we did get him on the phone, yes.’ Dubious. ‘He’s updated us, too. A puncture in the Black Mountains that necessitated an overnight stay.’ She closed her eyes, picturing Rob’s worn-out little car, neglected because he cycled everywhere, and wishing suddenly that he would get here, nervous, stuttering, brave Rob. ‘Very … punctilious,’ Gerard said. ‘If that’s the word.’

‘Rob will be here,’ she said, and suddenly she felt sick with tiredness, with that nameless insistent throb at the back of her head, that there was someone. Someone. Someone in your bed. She wanted her children. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I know you’re here to help, but…’

Gerard was on his feet, palms out. ‘Yes, of course, message received. But if you like, Ali can stick around. I mean, she can stay the night, all part of the service.’ Compton at the table nodded agreement.

‘No. I mean, thank you. But at the moment … not now. No thanks.’ There was a silence.