The Missing Husband (12 page)

Like the silent clock on the wall, time lost all meaning for Jo and the next thing she knew she was in her bedroom. She pulled the plug on the alarm clock on her bedside cabinet without bothering to check the hour. It would have surprised her to see that it was approaching morning, with only a few hours until sunrise. Lying on her back as she waited for sleep, Jo asked simply, ‘Where are you, David?’ then strained her ears as if waiting for an answer. The silence was deafening.

9

When Jo awoke on Sunday morning, consciousness arrived in the form of a series of thoughts, each one adding a leaden weight to her chest. Her misery was crushing and yet she still managed to drag herself to the bathroom in time to throw up. After dry retching for five minutes, she straightened up and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She barely recognized herself in the dim light borrowed from the bedroom. Her face was gaunt, her long hair dull and greasy and her fringe stuck out at all angles. To accessorize the haunted look she had carried through to a fourth day, her eyes were framed with dark, puffy bags. Jo leant forward until her head was resting on the bathroom cabinet. The cold surface of the mirror soothed her throbbing forehead. ‘I want to go back,’ she whispered. ‘I want to go back and make it all better.’

As if her words could weave magic, Jo sensed David standing behind her. She closed her eyes and time slipped seamlessly back to what had been little more than a month ago although it was starting to feel much longer. Immersing herself in the memory, she felt her husband place his hands on her hips and then pull her close. She could feel his body pushing against hers and she pulled herself up until she was leaning back against him.

‘Hello, beautiful,’ he whispered into her ear before nibbling her lobe.

Jo could feel her body responding to his and she reached behind her, grabbing his bare legs and pushing him against her. She groaned as she felt his hands sliding over the smooth material of her satin camisole, touching her breasts and then roaming ever downwards. Her skin tingled as his hand followed the rising curve of her stomach without any sign of trepidation. He wasn’t frightened any more.

Her pulse raced with excitement as she put her hand over his to keep it there. She held her breath and a second later David jerked his hand away with a gasp.

‘Did you feel that?’ he asked.

Jo took hold of his hand again and pressed it against her abdomen. ‘That’s your baby.’

David rested his chin on her shoulder. She could feel his breath warm her neck as he laughed.

‘I can’t believe it.’

Jo was tempted to point out that he’d had plenty of opportunity to acknowledge the changes in her body and accept there was a baby growing inside her but she didn’t want to sully the moment. ‘And next week we get to see him or her,’ she said, referring to the appointment for her twenty-week scan.’

‘Wow,’ he said and then dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Hello, little FB.’

She let go of his hand and tried to turn around to see his face but David wanted her to stay where she was. He was waiting for the next kick. ‘What did you just say?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said innocently.

‘Yes, you did. You just called our baby FB, didn’t you? What does it stand for?’ She felt him shrug so she pushed back hard against him. ‘Tell me!’

‘It’s, erm, silly. It stands for … Fur Ball.’

‘We’re having a baby, not a fluffy animal!’

‘Really?’ He grinned at her in the mirror. ‘OK, OK, and I know it’s not an obvious comparison, but babies are cute and cuddly too, aren’t they?’

Even though Jo wasn’t convinced he was telling her the full story, she was simply relieved that he was starting to connect with their unborn child. With a contented smile spreading across her face, she went to place her hand back on top of his, but it wasn’t there. The vision froze until another well-aimed kick from a tiny foot completely shattered the image she had conjured and Jo’s eyes snapped open to face reality. Her forehead was still pressed against the mirror and she was looking down at her hands gripping the washbasin, her knuckles as white as the porcelain. She barely had the strength to lift her gaze and confirm that the en suite was as empty as she feared.

‘You
were
ready to become a father, David. Maybe you still wanted to give me a hard time about it, but you
were
ready to accept we were having a baby,’ she whispered, painfully aware of the implications of what she was saying. She suddenly felt queasy again. ‘Please don’t be dead, David. Please, I beg you. I know you were scared about being a dad but now I’m terrified that you never will be.’

Jo’s knees started to buckle as she gave in to the need to sob. Keeping her grip on the washbasin, she went with the fall, hanging her head down between her outstretched arms and letting her tears drip on to the tiled floor. ‘I’ll forgive you anything, David. Anything! Just please, please, please don’t be dead!’

At some point later, Jo became aware of the dull ache in her knees and her back, and found herself curled up on the bathroom floor. As her surroundings returned to her consciousness, so did the memories of the night before. She unfurled her hand. There was a scab forming on her wound but it was the overwhelming sense of panic she had experienced on her fraught journey home that still felt raw. She could recall the phone calls from her mum and then Irene but no memory of what happened next. She rubbed her fingers together as she tried to work out why they felt so sore. It was only when she detected the faint smell of bleach that she realized it was chemical burning. She knew without a shadow of doubt that when she went downstairs, the kitchen would be pristine.

With no control over David’s whereabouts, Jo was determined to cling on to the few things she did have control over. While she was at home, she had nothing to do except wait but if she could just get through one more day then maybe she would feel strong enough to return to work. If she could make it to her desk then she could at least have part of the day where she could pretend everything was normal still. It was a minor goal but one that gave her the impetus to drag herself up off the floor and get showered and dressed although she was under no illusions; it was going to be another very long day.

Jo watched her computer flicker into life as she sat in the study preparing to discover what kind of future awaited the wife of a missing person. She already knew David’s employment at Nelson’s was hanging in the balance, but from the list of search results coming up, that would be only the beginning of her problems. The first site she opened provided a wealth of statistics. It didn’t so much give her answers as give her odds, but they provided at least one glimmer of hope and a reason to dismiss the growing fear that David was dead; only a fraction of one per cent of missing persons were found to have died and even though 95 per cent of those were adult males, David didn’t match the other high risk profiles. He didn’t have existing mental health issues and she refused to believe he was suicidal. So in all likelihood David had elected to disappear …

Pushing back against the chair, Jo put a little more space between herself and the computer screen. Was that hope she felt? Was she seriously wishing that David had left her? Of course it was better than David being dead but a husband abandoning his pregnant wife was not cause for celebration. She spread both hands over the growing mound of taught flesh across her midriff.

‘So tell me FB,’ she said softly. ‘Which would you prefer? That your daddy abandoned you or that he didn’t live long enough to see you born into the world?’

In the absence of an answer, she listened to her body, which ached from her toes, along her spine, right to the top of her skull, the deepest concentration of pain pooling in her heart. She stretched her neck and looked up at the map on the wall. It was a monument to their life together with a cluster of green pins around the Mediterranean and a thinner scattering further afield. Until she had met David, Jo hadn’t been much of a traveller. It wasn’t flying that bothered her but the stress of preparing for every eventuality, from delayed flights to missing passports. It negated any benefit in getting away at all, especially when Jo spent most of the holiday worrying about catching the flight home.

To remedy his wife’s anxiety, David wouldn’t allow Jo to become involved in any of the arrangements. He didn’t even tell her the times of the flights. He had the plan and she followed it. It worked so well that David became more and more adventurous. She could clearly remember the time he had announced they were going somewhere a little more exotic than they were used to. How could she forget?

‘Vietnam?’ she had stammered, still blinking in disbelief at the piece of paper she had pulled from inside the card. It quivered in her hand.

David, lying next to her in bed, had leant over to kiss her on the cheek. ‘Happy birthday, sweetheart.’

Jo was still looking at the list of instructions he had given her that would take them halfway across the world but it was the timeline rather than the destinations that had occupied her thoughts. ‘In six months’ time?’

‘It’s a bit more expensive than our usual trips but I’ve been saving up especially.’ He had wrapped an arm around her and slid down the bed so he could take in the look of astonishment on his wife’s face. Tears had sprung to her eyes.

Jo had blinked them away. ‘But wouldn’t the money be better spent on other things?’ she had asked.

The meaning had been lost on him. ‘No, I want to spend it on you. I love you, Jo.’

Despite herself, Jo had felt goose bumps prick her skin. She would never tire of hearing him say that. ‘But I’m thirty, David.’

‘I know.’

‘What about our other plans?’ She had waited then for the look of recognition on his face and when it hadn’t appeared she was forced to be blunt. ‘What about having our baby, David?’

For the first time, he had looked a little less comfortable. He had rested his head on her stomach without taking his eyes from her. ‘Isn’t that all the more reason to get in some heart-stopping holidays now, while we still can?’

‘Some? Has this got anything to do with that map you’ve put up in the study?’ Jo had tried to keep her tone light but the sense of disappointment had been crushing.

‘There’s so much out there to see. African plains, rainforests, ancient worlds …’ David’s eyes had lit up as his imaginary globetrotting trailed a blaze across his mind. ‘Life’s too short, Jo.’

Those simple words had wormed their way into Jo’s head and left her body with a sigh of resignation. David’s dad had died only the month before and it was hardly surprising that his own mortality should be playing on his mind. ‘There are no guarantees in life, I know that,’ she had told him. ‘But you were the one who planned out our future, and you were the one who worked out when we would be ready to start a family. I bought into that and I want a baby, David.
Our
baby. I thought you did too.’

‘Yes, I do. Eventually.’

Jo had looked into his eyes and couldn’t bring herself to crush his dreams, not while he was so fragile. She stroked his hair and did her best to soak up his enthusiasm for the holiday of a lifetime. One holiday, she had told herself. She wouldn’t be so malleable if he tried this again.

Jo’s eyes stung now as she stared at the green pin dotting the ‘i’ in Vietnam. There was no denying she had some good memories of that trip but she hadn’t been sorry to put away her passport. The baby chose now to give her a kick, reminding her exactly how she had drawn a line through his travel plans – a blue line that was meant to bring them more joy than any breathtaking vista – or so she had thought. She pulled herself upright so she could face the computer again.

The next site she visited described in detail the kind of financial and emotional limbo the partner of a missing person could face for years to come. As she continued to read, the guilt that had plagued her for days began to recede. She had committed some selfish acts, putting her needs before David’s, but she would never inflict the kind of torment he was inflicting on her now. David
was
alive, he
was
being unimaginably cruel and when the phone rang, Jo was more than ready to direct her growing fury at him.

‘Hi, it’s DS Martin Baxter,’ the policeman said with exaggerated friendliness to counter Jo’s harsh greeting.

‘Have you found him?’ Her heart was pounding; something that happened so frequently that her ribs permanently ached.

‘No, but I would like to call around to the house if that’s all right. I can give you an update and we can talk about the next steps.’

Her lungs deflated and her shoulders slumped. ‘Of course, anytime.’ The anger had disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Only desperation for news remained.

‘How about now?’

‘Oh, OK,’ Jo said realizing that the call had uncovered yet another aspect of her life over which she had no control.

‘And I’m afraid I’ll be coming mob handed. As I think I mentioned to you the other day, we need to carry out a search of your house and garden. It’s nothing to be alarmed about, just standard procedure,’ he said, clearly recalling the earful Steph had given him.

‘I understand,’ Jo said and she did. But that didn’t mean she was happy about it when four police officers marched into her home and invaded her privacy half an hour later, giving her more reason to hate her husband – if only she would allow herself that luxury.

‘We’ll try to make this as painless as possible,’ Martin said, ‘but just so you know, we may need to take some things away, particularly anything we can get a DNA trace from, like a razor?’

Jo nodded. All of David’s things were still there awaiting his return.

‘Good. I’ll give you receipts for anything we do take and while we’ll try not to disturb things too much, I can’t promise that you won’t notice we’ve been here. And you’re perfectly within your rights to watch as these guys carry out the search.’

‘I’d rather leave you to it but if you have to go into the garden can you try not to bring half of it back into the house with you?’ she asked as they all followed her gaze to the faint trail of footprints that had already been left in the hall. A long thin shadow crawled across the floor towards them as someone else appeared at the door.