The Loving Husband (6 page)

‘She did love me,’ Fran said. ‘It was mostly the money, and having to manage everything on our own.’ Carefully she set her empty glass down. ‘It makes you think, though,’ she said, not nostalgic exactly but softened towards her exasperating mother by Emme. ‘Having her. Don’t you find yourself remembering stuff? Things you thought you’d forgotten.’

He poured himself another glass of wine, and before he’d taken a sip was ready with how dull it had been, his parents were so quiet, his father so strait-laced, his mother uptight. Fishing trips along the fen, a wistful story about squatting in a derelict house with mates, a long, last summer, swimming in an icy flooded quarry. Leaning back on the sofa. ‘It seemed to last for ever,’ smiling. And then an offer, college or something like it. ‘As soon as I could get away, I was out of there. I didn’t need to be asked twice. I never really went back home after that.’

After so long without it the wine sent them both off to sleep unresisting – she even heard him snore as she dropped off, woozily content that something had been said, at least. It was only when she woke, before dawn and with a little knot of hangover forming behind her eyes, that she felt obscurely wrong-footed. It took her longer to realise that nothing had changed, except that the conversation couldn’t be had again. When he turned over to her a week later she held her breath but he just said, reasonable but no kinder than that, no sweeter, ‘Can’t you sleep?’ and then ‘Should I get you something?’

DS Doug Gerard was watching Fran across the table. He was watching her mouth. Her eyes.

He’s out there. It drummed in her head.
He’s still out there. The man I saw. She wanted to tell them. He’s going to come back. But Gerard spoke first.

‘Look,’ he said, firm but reasonable, as if it was the most straightforward thing in the world, ‘I think it would be useful to get you down to the station. Interview you and get this all down on paper, cover all the bases, put you in touch with the team.’ Behind them Carswell shifted, but Gerard went on, smoothly, ‘And while we’re at it, talk about sorting out somewhere for you to be while all this is going on. You’re naturally feeling highly vulnerable…’ But his eyes said something different, they roamed the room, inquisitive. He smiled. ‘Alternative accommodation, if you remember, last night—’

But he stopped, an eyebrow lifted, because Fran was shaking her head. She wanted to shove them to the door and slam it and bolt it. If she told this man, this DS Gerard,
The man I saw is coming back
, what would he say? Would he look at her and ask, so gently, so reasonably,
Why would you think that?
As if she was crazy. As if she was suspect. In her head she saw something that was growing, pushing its way through a rotten window frame.
Because he was still here. Because I saw him.
Because …

And if she did what the policeman wanted, if she left? If she gathered the children and went to hide in some safe house, some miserable bedsit? He’d still be out there, and instead the police would be in this house, with this man, this Doug Gerard opening her cupboards. And then she was on her feet, still shaking her head, stubborn.

‘We’re not leaving here. This is our home.’

Gerard looked at her a long moment, severe. Carswell had moved around from behind her and was next to him now.

‘All right,’ Gerard said carefully, and he was standing, zipping his fleece. ‘So why don’t you show me where you think you saw this man?’

And there was something in the way Gerard was looking at her that brought a sweat out under her arms, as if he knew what kind of woman she was, what she’d done, what had brought them here. As if he already knew the exact chain of events and he was just waiting to see if she’d tell him.

We love it here.

That had been a lie, too.

On the drive up, she had felt a sinking as she registered the landscape flattening, emptying and London was left behind. They had passed the grey spires and towers of Cambridge, a smudge on the horizon, then a famous cathedral rising like an island, some old flint churches hiding among trees and, increasingly, nothing. The road had dwindled to an arrow-straight single carriageway with fields butting dead-level up against it: not even a hedge, barely a tree to soften it, and landmarks turned into outlandish things, nothing natural or old or familiar. A single wind generator, vast up close, like something from space; a concrete silo as big as a tower block sitting alone in a field ringed with wire fencing; a stretch of shiny solar panels all tilted towards the flat grey sky.

A truck had passed them going the other way at speed and it hadn’t slowed or conceded room on the narrow carriageway, roaring by so close the car shook and as Nathan at the wheel wrestled them back off the verge they could see the mud crusted on its big tyres.

When they had got out of the car, finally, the first thing that had struck Fran was the noise: it was empty but it wasn’t quiet, and walking into the lee of the big house, the agent walking towards them, she could still hear it. A distant roar that must have been traffic on some far-off invisible motorway but felt like something stranger, diffusing uninterrupted across the plain like smoke.

Beside her Nathan spread his arms like a king, looking up. ‘All this space,’ he said, and she had seen the wide pale sky reflected in his eyes, a great barrelling mass of cloud building along the horizon.

Emme was in her room. With Gerard standing behind her Fran called up the stairs, sharp and urgent, and Emme appeared at the top. Her small face was pale.

‘I need you to wait up there for a bit, sweetheart,’ Fran told her. ‘I’ve just got to show the man something.’ She felt abruptly breathless, her heart speeding in her chest just at the thought of stepping back outside, as if he was still standing among the poplars, waiting.
Someone killed your daddy
.

Who? Who? Who would kill him? Nathan, steady Nathan, husband and father, always in control, Nathan who never lost his temper. Did people die for barely any reason, on no provocation? She knew they did: a botched burglary, an idle beet-picker high on GHB, road rage. Spill the wrong man’s pint in a pub and he follows you home. But Nathan got back, he parked the car, he came inside our house and wiped his boots on the mat and hung up his coat. He came to bed. That was the part that made it her fault, she couldn’t get rid of that thought. If she’d done something different in bed, if she’d said the right thing, if she’d turned and held on to him, in the dark.

She swallowed. ‘Emme?’

‘Is it about Daddy?’ said Emme, solemn, not moving, and Fran took a deep breath.

‘Yes,’ she said, then quickly, thinking, Don’t tell her any more, mustn’t frighten her, ‘Just stay up there. Please. I won’t be long.’

She walked past Gerard in the kitchen, quickly; she didn’t want him to see how afraid she was. She was at the door and turning the handle, dizzy with panic but still moving, and then DS Gerard was behind her in the yard. She kept on, one foot behind the other, and then they were past the shed and the horizon yawned. The huge sky was streaked across with the remains of rain cloud, tinged pink towards the east: this was what Nathan had wanted. The big skies, his kingdom. The pale tent gleamed at its centre; a man in a white hooded boiler suit straightened from what looked like a toolbox to look at them. Another suited figure emerged from the tent to stand beside him.

She must have staggered because the horizon tipped and then Gerard was next to her, with his hand tight on her arm. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. She wanted to shake him off but the pressure on her arm steadied her, and she stood stiffly. She couldn’t look at the white tent but wherever she looked it sat at the edge of her vision. ‘This can wait,’ Gerard said. ‘We can come back with the FLO later, the weather’s going to hold.’

Fran stared at him. ‘No,’ she said, clenched. She looked towards the poplars and for a second she thought he was there, standing motionless between the leafless trees. She froze.

‘See something?’ asked Gerard, quickly. The row of bare trees. No one there.

‘No,’ she said, with a gasp, ‘no, I … nothing.’ She began to walk stiffly across the yellow grass, soaked with last night’s rain. The sound of run-off trickling in the ditches in her ears, under the distant hum of traffic they couldn’t see. The chicken barn’s roof had a dull sheen, and the field under its stubble was wet, sticky: she heard Gerard make a sound of disgust, lifting a shoe clogged with mud.

‘The pub.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘He’d been to the pub, he came home. The Queen’s Head. Maybe someone there … maybe something happened. Maybe someone followed him home.’

‘You did tell us,’ said Gerard, and she thought his eyes slid away from her. ‘We’ll go through it again at the station.’ He gestured ahead. ‘One thing at a time.’

Her heart pounding, she worked her way round, walking away from the men along the ditch to the place where there was a plank set over it. The road was beyond them, perhaps half a mile away, the row of trees – she fixed her eyes on them as she walked, watching. The same road that other car had been travelling on, the car whose headlights had swept the flat land at some time after two in the morning. That morning: it seemed to her not just longer ago but in a different life.

One foot then the other and there, where it was dark behind her eyes, the figures moved in the landscape, two a.m. Nathan walked out across the field to the ditch, someone followed him – or waited for him. She thought of the blood, the front of his body soaked, blood congealing sticky on her hands as she pulled at his deadweight.

She stopped, trying to subdue the shivering that rose inside her and failing, looked from the tent to the road, gauging angles, distance.

‘There.’ She pointed and Gerard was kneeling in the mud, he was looking.

‘Right,’ he said, interested at last. ‘Yes.’

When they got back to the kitchen DS Gerard had asked her if she’d be all right to take Emme to school on her own. ‘Ed can come with you,’ he said, shifting as she fed Emme’s arms into the sleeves of her coat at the table.

Out in the black field, standing beside him, she had heard his breath catch and accelerate as he peered down between his knees into the clogged stubble. ‘Well,’ he said, a hand up to shade his eyes, ‘you’re sure this would be where you saw him?’ A pause, the hand shifting a little so she caught a glimpse of his face, wary. ‘And definitely a man, right? A male?’

How could she be sure? The whole night ballooned in her head like a nightmare: none of it seemed real. ‘I think so,’ was all she had managed, as she had knelt beside him to see.

Emme had been waiting for them, solemn, in the kitchen.

Gerard seemed uneasy around Emme: she was quiet. ‘I’ll be OK,’ Fran told him. ‘I’ll be quick.’ And she had almost run round the side of the house pulling Emme, to give her no chance to stop and turn and look.

They hurried, out of the village and along the wet road under the big sky, towards the school. It was on the edge of the next village, no more than a low-lying cluster of buildings and a copse. Leaning into the wet wind Fran held Emme’s hand tight, tugging her onwards, past puddles, past roadkill, a bird no more than a smear of feathers. In the buggy Ben was too startled by their jolting pace to protest.