The Loving Husband (39 page)

They both turned towards Fran as she came into view. ‘Ask
her
,’ said Sue, yanking the buggy back so savagely the toddler inside it began to squall. ‘Stupid bitch,’ and she was off down the bumpy pavement, hunched over the pushchair. Fran didn’t know which of them she was calling a stupid bitch. She took a step back but it was too late, the blonde had slammed the car door and was stamping past her in heels.

Strongly built, big in the shoulder, as she made straight for the back of the house the woman seemed to know exactly where she was going. Fran was behind her when she banged the door open and she saw Miranda’s face, fear ambushing her as she stood helpless behind the kitchen table.

‘The fuck,’ said the blonde, rounding from Miranda to Fran, savage and contemptuous. ‘Who the fuck are you two, then?’ And when they gaped back at her, ‘Is it true then? The old bastard’s dead?’ Her jaw thrust forward, in a tough, unlined face, though she must have been fifty if she was a day. She was wearing a camel polo neck and a tight skirt, small gold earrings; she might almost have been a businesswoman except there was something, just something about the way she held herself, her big chest thrusting, like a figurehead.

‘Nathan?’ said Miranda, staring, gobsmacked.

‘He owes me money,’ the woman said. ‘He’s got my shit.’ Then, with a frowning double-take, ‘Who the fuck is Nathan?’

‘You’d better sit down,’ said Fran, feeling nothing through the adrenalin, no fear, no panic.

Emme had taken one look at her and fled, up the stairs.

Fran went to the fridge and pulled out the bottle of white wine that had been open since the night Nathan died; since before he died, as a matter of fact. But before she’d set it on the table the back door opened again, and there stood Karen, pink with exertion as if she’d run there, with Harry in tow.

‘Had to see it with my own eyes,’ she said, pushing him in ahead of her. ‘Before Sue got the whole village round to get a look. Where did you spring from, Jilly-Ann?’ In two strides she was at the table. Harry took one look at the women ranged around the kitchen and ran before anyone could call him back, on the stairs and knowing where to find Emme by now. Miranda, head down, was filling glasses, frowning in concentration, to the brim, and without a word she pushed one over to Karen. Fran watched her.
She knows.

‘What did you come back for?’ said Karen. ‘You don’t look bad, as it goes.’ Laughing her rasping laugh. ‘Not dead, anyway.’

The blonde – Jilly-Ann, Gillian, whoever she was, she wasn’t much like the picture on the card but were they ever, Fran knew that much – circled the glass Miranda had set in front of her with her ringed and manicured hand and glared. ‘Me dead? You what?’ she said. ‘I’m still his legal wife, I’ll have you know. Someone said he’d been found dead out in the field. If he’s snuffed it this place is mine.’

Karen eyed her. ‘He’s not dead, Jilly-Ann. He sold the house.’

‘You’re John Martin’s wife,’ said Fran.

Jilly-Ann laughed, sour. ‘For all the good it do me. He’s sold up, eh?’ She looked around the room, scornful.

‘Why’d you leave, then, just like that?’ said Karen, setting her glass back down. ‘Must have been a cushy number, out here.’

Jilly-Ann snorted. ‘You’re kidding, aren’t you? Always after me for sex, smelly old pervert. Tight with it, kept saying he’d look after me but never saw any of it, did I?’ She lifted the glass to her lips and made a face. ‘Not worth the candle. I’m set up nice now, quiet little street on the other side of town. Regulars.’ The flicker of a smile. ‘Police off my case, out there.’

She looked from face to face. ‘How much you pay for this old shithole, then?’ she said, drily, then let out a snort when Fran told her. ‘Maybe worth getting after him after all,’ she said, sidetracked into calculating. ‘
Mr
Martin.’ Her head lifted and turned, like a predator’s, and she stalked for the door.

Then she stopped, her hand on the doorknob. ‘Who did die, then?’ she said. No more than an afterthought.

‘My brother,’ said Miranda, sharp and clear, the first time she’d spoken and they all turned to her. ‘My brother,’ and nodding towards Fran, ‘her husband.’
She knows.
Jilly-Ann pouted, indifferent, and, in that moment, turning for the door, she seemed only contemptuous of all three of them still trapped there while she could go free.

As they heard her car fire noisily in the street, at the table Karen let out a whistle of grudging admiration. ‘She’s kidding herself if she thinks she’s going to get anything out of old Martin. The landlady of the Queen’s found him washing in the Gents’ last week. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s sleeping rough, with your money in the bank. Sue said someone’s been kipping in her shed, too. Found a leather jacket and some tins of beans.’

‘Leather jacket?’ said Fran, because that didn’t sound like the farmer. Bez?

She must have looked pale because Karen filled the glass again but this time she pushed it towards Fran. ‘Go on,’ she said. ‘Do you good.’

But Fran shook her head. ‘I’m driving. There’s somewhere I’ve got to be.’

He sent her the message as she was sitting at lights on the ring road contemplating an illuminated sign,
Severe weather warning.
The sky was grey as iron, but still nothing had settled, the flakes materialising, ghostly, only to disappear as if she’d imagined them.

Running late. Got a plan, though.

Karen hadn’t stayed long, and Fran hadn’t tried to keep her. For these four, five days, when her life had threatened to fall apart Karen had been there, her safety net – and now Fran was watching her back away. But she needed to be alone with Miranda.

‘That woman,’ said Miranda. ‘Your friend. What did you say her name was? I remember her. Or someone like her.’ They were in the spare bedroom, making up the bed, each on one side.

‘Karen? Her surname’s Humphries.’ But her mind wasn’t on Karen.

Miranda had been waiting for the question, from the sigh she gave when Fran straightened on the other side of the bed and said, ‘You knew what Nathan was up to, didn’t you? At Black Barn. And after, when he went off the radar.’

‘I’m not stupid,’ said Miranda, shortly. ‘Little sisters keep their eyes open and their mouths shut.’ Then, ‘The police think you did it. And you’ve got to ask yourself why. What they think you found out?’

In the spare room the light had been fading. The two of them had left the smooth, clean, made bed, pillows neat and plumped, and were standing at the window. The landscape turning white.

‘My friend Jo thought he was gay,’ Fran said. ‘She saw him on the Heath, with a man.’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t think he was anything.’

‘People found him attractive,’ said Miranda. ‘I remember that. Men and women. But he wasn’t interested in sex. He used it.’ She paused. ‘And he used people.’ She leaned forwards over the table, her chin in her hands, frowning. ‘He did badly in his exams. He hated that. He took off for Black Barn, he disappeared inside that house with the other two. And when he came back out again, he’d learned something. I don’t know who taught him, but he’d learned he had a talent.’

Fran pulled into the car park of the Angel in the Fields. Pink lights had been strung over the dilapidated porch, in preparation for the Valentine’s night. He still didn’t have a name, in her mobile. Nick.

From the spare room window layers of purple cloud had sat on the horizon like a mountain range, a straight silver gleam of water where light escaped from somewhere in the thick sky to reflect in a ditch. The poplars had been invisible from where the women stood but trees feathered the dark land somewhere off to the left.

‘You knew,’ said Fran, and in that moment Miranda shivered, and backed away from the window.

‘I’m not used to this,’ she said. ‘Out there it’s either air-con or sweating in the streets. Day in, day out.’

She looked pale, suddenly, she moved towards the door and Fran followed. It was on the stairwell, in the gloom, that Miranda stopped and turned, the two of them enclosed in the dark, neither up nor down. A place to tell secrets.

‘Yes, I knew. Once I got far enough away, to the other side of the world, it seemed almost like a dream, something I’d made up. He’d told our father. God knows why, to impress the old bastard, and Dad would drop hints. Once, when I’d had enough of him going on about his golden boy and I said, he’s nothing but a glorified builder, he said something about that being just window dressing. He said he was doing something much more important, but no one could know. Something for the police.’

In the warm enclosed space Fran leaned back against the wall, thinking of the old man’s voice on the phone to her, and feeling her heart thunder. Miranda’s face a pale oval below her.

‘When were you sure?’ she said, and Miranda shifted in the shadows.

‘When you got married,’ she said at last. ‘Dad called me. He said I wasn’t to think it was a real marriage. He said it was just part of Nathan’s cover.’

And in the dark Fran saw Ali’s face, heard her voice.
Think why
, she’d said.
Think why I can’t tell you.
‘All that time?’ she said, and it whirled around her, as if a tornado had struck and her life had been thrown up in the air around her. She gripped the banister. ‘All that time. He was working undercover, for the police.’

‘He didn’t ever want an ordinary job, he didn’t want an ordinary life, he didn’t care about family, or children, he just wanted control. I suppose whoever recruited him at Black Barn saw that in him.’ She almost whispered. ‘That ability to suspend normal needs, to give over his whole life to a lie.’

Nathan walking through the door of Jo’s front room and fixing on her, his target. Nathan watching her to see what she wanted, what would hook her. What was it? Was it having no father? Was it growing up in bedsits, packing up and moving on? Mum had loved her, for all the crap.

‘You hear about them,’ Fran said. ‘The women they marry, kept in the dark while they’re off, embedded, undercover, whatever they call it. All those conferences, all those elaborate props to show he’d been where he said he’d been, the mugs and totes…’ She remembered the nylon briefcase then but it didn’t slow her down. ‘You think, how could anyone be that gullible? That thick?’

As for why.

‘We don’t know for sure,’ said Miranda, uneasy. ‘I’m sure he … he…’

‘Loved me?’ Fran tipped her head back, looking up into the house’s tall roof space, the invisible whirling sky, willing the pieces to return to earth. My house. My family. Not his. ‘You know what? I’m past that. I want to know what he was using me for.’

And now she got out of the car and walked to the clumped willows between the car park and the water. It was raw and humid and the water moved slowly, as though thickening in the cold. Nick, Nick, Nick.

Standing on the bank as the green water slid past, Fran got out the phone. It had to be done carefully, because Nick was smart, Nick was as smart as Nathan, and if she sent the wrong message back, too bright, too eager, he’d know. It was time for her to be the clever one, the user – she needed to know if Nick had been lying to her, too, if he was up to his neck in his old life still. If he had been the one had followed Nathan in the dark across the muddy field.
Baby It’s You
. Nick thought she was his, all right. She heard the pub door behind her and she turned.

For Valentine’s Eric was wearing a black T-shirt, emblazoned with a heart dripping blood and skewered with a knife. His legs were skinnier than a child’s in black jeans as he stood in the doorway. ‘You’re back,’ he said, stepping aside to allow her in. ‘Thorney’s inside.’

The pub was serving but it was quiet; she could see a couple of men talking quietly on stools at the bar. Eric led her behind the bar to the kitchen door.

The room was brightly lit, low-ceilinged, with a shelf of catering jars of pickles and it smelled of old grease. There was a big range, a row of deep-fat fryers and a stainless steel sink where a small, hunched man in shirtsleeves and an apron was doggedly scrubbing at a huge saucepan. Thinning grey hair around a bald spot, when he turned she saw pale watery eyes but he was clean-shaven, the shirt was ironed and the cuffs carefully rolled.

Sloping shouldered, holding the brimming half of cider Eric had poured him, Thorney walked ahead of her into the dim end of the bar. The old man set the drink down with care, but didn’t touch it, easing himself stiffly on to a bar stool. ‘I saw it in the paper,’ he said, looking at the cider. ‘I thought,’ frowning, ‘Al wasn’t the sort to get himself done over. I mean, it happens.’ He drew in his shoulders a little, defensive. He must have to watch himself, thought Fran with a pang, hard to get old, if you’re gay round here. He must be seventy.

‘I called him Nathan,’ she said, as the last of the man she’d married slipped out of her grasp. ‘What sort was he, then?’

The old man eyed her. ‘You got kids,’ he said, and she nodded. He reached for the glass then, and took a sip, and brightened.

‘It’s all right,’ she told him. Not caring if they thought she was in denial. ‘I don’t think he came here for sex. I want to know what else he was up to. I want to know who he met that last night. I want to know how he got himself killed.’ Music had come on, behind the bar, a soul song, twenty, thirty years old, and in the dim room things mellowed, shifted. ‘But first I want to know about Black Barn.’

Thorney took another drink and leaned back on the stool, and she caught a glimpse of a younger man, with the drink and the music. ‘I don’t know what Eric said, but I only went over to Black Barn the once.’ He sighed. ‘They had a stash of E from somewhere, the word was. I was too old for E even then but I went along with it, and I was curious, the place had a reputation, like all sorts were going on there. But they were just kids, I dunno, seventeen, eighteen, I’m not into kids, Christ.’

He reached for the drink again, agitated. ‘Weird old place, black weatherboarding, they had no electric, I remember a bathtub full of dirty water, mattresses everywhere, music playing day and night, leaves growing in through the windows, green light. Green.’ He mused. ‘Maybe it looked like paradise. Somebody was giving them money, because they had booze, and drugs. There was a girl when I went, but then it was just lads.’