The Loving Husband (26 page)

In the dark bedroom Fran swayed with the sleeping Ben in her arms, unable to stop. She had tried to offer him the breast but he’d reared back, hysterical. She made herself breathe. Stop it. Stop it. She had to think clearly, if they were going to survive this.

‘She said he was sitting on the ground,’ she told Ali Compton. ‘On the side of the road.’ It had taken half an hour of coaxing to get that much out of Emme: she’d had to bring Ben up and pace with him, talking over his howls. ‘I think…’ She hesitated. ‘She and Nathan saw a man in a playground, a long time ago, she called him the bad man. I think it’s the same man. I think … I think Nathan may have known him.’

One of the fluorescent tubes in the kitchen had blown; it had gone as they came through the door from Karen’s. The pop and sudden alteration in the light as it blew was what had sent Emme fleeing upstairs but Fran had forgotten until she walked back into the room. The kitchen looked starker, its proportions somehow lopsided in the thinner, greyer light, one wall in shadow.

A big man like a giant, with crazy hair. He had wet on his trousers.

She crossed to the side, to the drawer that Rob had painstakingly refilled with his big raw hands, his shaking hands … and slowly she opened it.

The photograph was there on the top. The three young men in trousers pulled up too high, shirts too big. Rob on the left, half out of the frame, his face blurred by some quick movement but in a funny way that was how she knew it was him, that dodging motion. Nathan was on the other side sitting up on the fence with his knees apart and hands holding on, poised as if he was about to spring off.

He was skinnier, very skinny, but still she recognised him immediately, the dark arch of his eyebrows, the angle of his jaw, his mouth. Fran had never thought about a man’s looks too much, it was something else that caught you usually – a combination of cleverness and intensity and charm, to do with how much he wanted
you
– but with Nathan you couldn’t ignore the looks. It occurred to her now that he knew it, too. The looks had taken him a long way. Was that what Jo had against him? For the first time Fran wondered about that speed-dating evening where Jo said she’d found him. It hadn’t worked, that was what Jo had said, meaning they hadn’t fancied each other. Or he hadn’t fancied her? But she’d ended up asking him for dinner anyway because how could you not? Looking like that.

In the faded colours of the photograph the three figures shifted as she looked at them, between boys and men. In the middle was the one she didn’t know: in the middle was Bez.

He leaned back, lordly, the tallest of them, an elbow hooked behind him over the top of the fence, a shirt open at the neck, a great bush of red-gold hair. She could even see the tiny sharp jut of his Adam’s apple above the collar. He was lazy, at ease, as if he could reach out and take anything he wanted. One of his hands was lifted to shade his eyes, and half his face was hidden.

Behind her on the table her phone blipped, receiving a message.

Carefully, Fran settled the drawer’s contents and closed it again but the photograph was still out, propped on the side.

DS Gerard had given her a card too, with his number on. She stood still, looking around the room, and her eye fell on the wall-mounted telephone, where she’d wedged it.

‘You have to communicate with all of us, though,’ Ali Compton had said before she hung up, something formal and weary in her voice. ‘Like it or not, Doug Gerard is in charge of the investigation. And he’s a good detective. He’s on your side.’

She dialled, looking at the list Nathan had pinned to the wall as it rang. His handwriting.
Doctor, Dad, Nathan, School, Dentist, Rob
. Rob.

On her side? It didn’t feel like it. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Ali Compton had said at last, patient, tired. ‘I wish you’d let me come. I wish you’d talk to me.’ Then when she hadn’t said anything, a sigh. ‘Lock the doors. Put the panic button where you can get to it.’

She was ready to hang up when he answered.

Tell Gerard everything, her wildest suspicions, her fears. She should tell him about the bad man, that the bad man was Bez, that he’d met up with Nathan in a playground months ago and Nathan hadn’t wanted to tell her. She should say, I think my husband had a secret life, that has something to do with the big-bellied man in construction called Julian and that started all those years ago, in that squat with those boys, she should say, and while you’re at it, what about the man who sold us this house? The creepy farmer whose wife left him and no one seems to care where she went.

She should say, the man who killed my husband came into my bed and fucked me, he put his mark on me and he is watching me, he is stalking me, he is leaving chocolates for me in my own kitchen. Someone wants me, and he is going to come back for me.

‘Yes?’

Doug Gerard’s voice was rough and gravelly, something loose about it, something intimate. She looked at the clock: it was eight o’clock. It sounded like he was in the pub and a couple of pints in; for a second she felt like a disgruntled wife or a jealous girlfriend, and with a quick tiny flash of anger from nowhere she thought, Fuck you.

‘It’s Fran Hall,’ she said, stiff. ‘I just wanted to let you know. We won’t be here tomorrow.’

And only then, the phone in her hand, did she scroll down and read the message. She knew the number by heart but her phone didn’t.
I’ve got to see you
, it said. Her lips moved.

She moved her thumb across the screen to the little box in the corner that said
Delete
.

The dawn was still a line at the horizon when they turned south. In the back seat Ben and Emme were asleep.

Fran had watched the road from the tall window of the spare room for a long five minutes concealed in the dark, before hurrying Emme out, Ben in the baby seat.

If someone had stopped her. Who are you running away from?

From the police, the men coming into her kitchen without knocking, sitting her in front of all those strangers with their cameras and their questions. Who are you scared of? Of Ali Compton, looking at her, kind Ali Compton, worried Ali Compton saying,
Talk to me.
If Fran opened her mouth to talk about
that
, though, what would come out?

But most of all she was running away from him. Scared of him. Because he hadn’t stayed outside, he hadn’t just thrown stones at her window, he hadn’t just watched, from between the poplars in the dark. He’d come inside. Inside her house. Into her bedroom with the change clinking in his pockets. Inside her.

And he’d be back, she knew that now beyond a doubt, looking down on her terror from high overhead. A territorial thing: he thought she was his, now.

If the police had known where she was going, and were following her, they would wonder why Fran took the route she did, left on the main road and not right to the motorway, doubling back to Oakenham and skirting it on the ring road. The odd light was coming on in the small dim houses, people stirring, but Rob’s was dark. His car wasn’t on the drive. She rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. She rang it again; peering through the letter box she saw a drift of mail on the mat in the dark. Before she flipped the letter box shut with a clatter she caught a stale whiff, of things going off, unemptied bins.

Fighting the traffic she found her way into London: side streets, a ramp, a car park and a ticket barrier, down and then, in the warm subterranean concrete gloom she came to a halt, handbrake on, ignition off.
Here.
Gently she set her cheek to rest on the steering wheel, arms up either side, and breathed out.

A blessed muffled quiet lasted less than a minute and then from the back Emme said. ‘Are we escaped, Mummy?’ Then, ‘I want a wee.’

She didn’t know what she’d have done if Ken on the magazine’s reception hadn’t recognised her. In the foyer she had felt as out of place as a traveller selling heather with Ben on her hip and Emme wiping ketchup on her sweatshirt. Ken had lifted the phone and asked for Jo.

And then they were outside and in the garden square that lay two streets across, Jo’s hand firm on her elbow, propelling her through the iron gates, and Emme half-running to keep up. ‘Jesus, Fran.’ Jo sat abruptly on a bench, making space for her. Emme walked to the edge of the grass and stood there solemnly, watching a pigeon attacking a crisp packet. ‘Jesus. What the hell? What happened?’

‘I … he … I just…’ And Fran didn’t know even how to start, it choked her. ‘I don’t know what happened. I just found him…’ and then it was coming up inside her, unstoppable, she blurted it out. ‘You didn’t call,’ she said, and she could hear her voice shaking. ‘You knew. You knew. But you didn’t call me?’

Jo blinked, flushed, then said, terse, ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I should have sent a message, I should have…’ She stopped, wincing: she’d never been great at backing down, over anything. She looked tense, shadows under her eyes as if she hadn’t been sleeping.

‘I needed you,’ said Fran. ‘I needed
someone.
And you think this is somehow my fault, that I got myself into this? Or is it
his
fault, is it Nathan’s fault he’s dead?’ She jerked her head up and stared, furious, into the sky where an airliner was banking and tracking off to the west, then back down. ‘I got pregnant. I wanted the baby, I did what he asked. If it was a mistake, it was a mistake, all right, it was a mess – but this? Does it make this my fault?’

And then as Jo stared, abruptly Fran ran out of anger. ‘Did you read it online?’ Fran said. ‘Or did the police…’ She faltered, thinking of Ken and the heads turning in the lobby, recovered herself. ‘Did they turn up here? Who did they talk to?’ She flicked an eye to the climbing frame where Emme was perched, solemnly, with her back to them, very still.

Leaning back against the low back of the old wooden bench, Jo pulled her hands out of her pockets and shoved them under her arms, leaning forward. ‘They called.’

‘You told them I’d had an affair,’ said Fran, blunt.

Jo set her jaw. ‘Have you had an affair?’ Her voice was cold.

‘What did you say to them?’ Fran was quiet.

Jo flushed, furious. ‘I said we had lost touch, mainly because I didn’t like him, I didn’t like the way he treated you. There was something … They asked me if I knew him as Alan or Nathan Hall. I mean, don’t you think that was weird?’

‘No, people do that.’ She breathed out. ‘You didn’t tell them.’

‘No,’ said Jo. ‘Did you?’ Not giving an inch.

‘I didn’t…’ Fran shook her head, ‘I didn’t want them to know. I didn’t want it to have happened.’

Jo sat down again beside her, hard, her shoulders hunched in the coat. ‘I did wonder,’ she said, ‘if you’d done it. I kind of…’ She sighed.

‘You wished I had?’ said Fran bitterly. ‘What, a blow for female empowerment? Bit late for that, once I’d had his kids. Why did you hate him so much? Was it that you…’ She hesitated, a fraction too long, and Jo pounced.

‘You thought I wanted him? Him, the babies, the big farmhouse and all the rest of it? No way. No. Fucking. Way.’ So why? But before Fran could ask it Jo pulled her hands out from under her arms and she saw a ring. Jo held the hand out, defiant.

‘The same guy? The … builder?’

‘You remembered,’ said Jo, frowning. ‘He’s a nice man. It’s not marriage I objected to.’ And she leaned forwards, elbows on her knees, earnest. She looked down at Ben in Fran’s arms, then up into her face. ‘It wasn’t the deal, it was
him
. It was Nathan, or Alan, or whoever the fuck he is. Was.’

‘All right,’ Fran said urgently. ‘It was
him
. But what about him?’

‘I need a coffee,’ said Jo, standing. ‘Christ, I need a drink. There’s a stall over the other side. Remember that?’

Fran stood up, working Ben into the sling as he slept. She did remember. Jo looked weary: she looked almost soft. ‘Him. How many times did I wish I’d never laid eyes on him, let alone invited him over that night? I thought he’d take your mind off Nick, is all.’ She shook her head. ‘He really did a number on you, though, didn’t he? Pulled out all the stops. They say they can spot vulnerability from a hundred yards, they can see it from behind, in the way you walk. Guys like that. They find the weak spot and they go straight there. It’s why he didn’t bother with me.’ She let out a short laugh. ‘No weak spots.’

‘Jo,’ said Fran, hearing a far-off bell sound in her head, an alarm. ‘He’s the one that’s dead, remember. You’re talking like he was a psychopath.’

‘He was a fucking dinosaur. Shutting you up out there. Carine said he’d told you you didn’t need a new computer. Wouldn’t let you use the car.’

‘Carine?’ She felt the wind knocked out of her, a kind of joy that she hadn’t disappeared after all, all that time she’d thought she was on her own. ‘You talked about us?’

But Jo didn’t seem to hear. ‘He was never your type,’ she said, frowning into the distance as if trying to understand something. ‘That’s what I don’t get. You always liked the full-on boys, the ones who liked to show you off, to see you having fun.’

‘Nick was, he was…’ She stopped.

‘At least Nick fancied you,’ said Jo, blunt.

A silence. The little wheeled stall was in full view and Emme waiting for them there, staring from them to a row of drink cans, but they slowed, stopped.

‘Nick was crazy about you,’ Jo went on. ‘He’d have done anything for you. The way he used to look at you.’

If she closed her eyes and let it, it would all come back. Those long nights sitting at the back of a dark club, men coming up and sitting next to her, people who knew Nick. ‘He wanted to marry you,’ said Jo.

Nick coming in late at night, euphoric over something. The money. The flat he bought, neon light sculptures, sound decks. A ring.

‘You don’t know everything about Nick,’ Fran said, quiet.

‘So tell me.’ They were at the little trolley and Jo was buying them coffees, a carton of juice for Emme, who clutched it and ran off again, towards a neglected climbing frame where more pigeons were scratching.