The Missing Husband (37 page)

As Jo pulled into the drive she was reminded of all those unremarkable car journeys they had taken together, never once considering that the drive home on the evening before David’s trip to Leeds would be their last. With her eyes fixed firmly to the front, Jo began to reach a hand over to the passenger seat as if she could reconnect with the man she remembered and not the demon she had imagined him to be for far too long. Her fingers stretched tentatively towards the space he ought to occupy, the tips of her fingers electrified with desperate longing as if she was within a hair’s breadth of the man she loved. He was sitting next to her and any moment now she would touch his arm, trace her hand towards his neck, comb her fingers through his hair and pull him towards her. Together again, at last …

Jo held her breath, anticipating that the power of her mind would give substance to her desire but her fingers sliced through emptiness. With a sob that caught in her throat, she let her hand fall but it dropped only a couple of inches before hitting rigid plastic. She trailed her fingers around the curve of the baby carrier handle until she touched lamb-soft wool. Spreading her hand wide and with barely any pressure at all, she explored the folds of the blanket until she found that long-lost connection back to her husband: Archie, David’s flesh and blood.

She turned to Archie and braved a smile. ‘Welcome home, sweetheart.’

Her eyes were glistening as she turned to open the car door where a shadow loomed in front of her. Jo got out of the car as if she hadn’t seen it and walked to the passenger side to retrieve her son. She wondered whether or not Steph would go away if she continued to ignore her but she knew her sister too well.

‘You might as well make yourself useful and help carry some of Archie’s things into the house.’

Steph did as she was told without a word.

Once inside, Jo set about unwrapping each of Archie’s many layers until he was snuggled only in her arms. ‘So go on then,’ she demanded. After the day she’d had, Jo was more than ready to face her sister’s wrath. ‘Get it off your chest.’

‘I’m here to apologize.’

Jo’s eyes narrowed. She hadn’t expected that. She was, after all, the one who had corrupted her niece. It had been irresponsible to let Lauren pierce her nose, whatever the reasoning behind it. If she had been in a better frame of mind, she wouldn’t have even considered it, she could see that now. She could see everything so much clearer since her confrontation with Steve. ‘No,
I
should be the one apologizing. I shouldn’t have done anything without your approval first.’

‘Lauren told me what happened.’

‘All of it?’

It was Steph’s turn to narrow her eyes. ‘I think so. The pathetic excuse of a boyfriend who I didn’t even know existed who thought he could deflower my daughter and then proceeded to destroy her already fragile self-confidence by calling her a ginger minger?’

‘Deflower?’ Jo asked with a smile.

‘She’s my baby girl, Jo. I’m not ready to think of it in any other terms.’

Jo continued to smile as she looked down at her sleeping son. He was eleven weeks old now but no bigger than a newborn. It was impossible to imagine him as a grown man let alone how she would deal with his rites of passage. ‘I understand,’ she said. Where once there had been cold fear at the prospect of being responsible for such a tiny being, now she felt warmth flooding her chest.

‘I see you’ve got him back.’

‘It was a close call. Are we friends again?’ Jo asked.

‘You’ve had me worried sick for the past couple of days, Jo. After everything you’ve been through I was so scared that I’d tipped you over the edge. I didn’t sleep at all on Sunday night and if I hadn’t managed to speak to Heather last night, who reassured me that you were OK, then you might have had the police breaking down your door at one point.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No,
I’m
sorry and I need you to know that no matter what you do or what you say, I’ll always love you. I’m never going to abandon you, Jo. I’m not David.’

Jo held her smile for a second, maybe two, and then the mask she had been presenting to her sister slowly began to crumble. Her lip trembled and the curve of her mouth dipped. ‘I don’t think he did abandon me, Steph.’ Her voice cracked and a cold shiver ran down her spine as she considered exactly what that meant. ‘I know where all the money went.’

As Jo described her confrontation with Steve, literally blow by blow, Steph’s mouth fell open.

‘It was meant to be a temporary loan,’ Jo explained of the money David had given Steve. ‘Apparently it was after David had taken me for the twenty-week scan. He told Steve he didn’t need the money he’d saved for a holiday until the baby was born, so he gave him his bank card to withdraw the £3,000 to pay off his debts, or some of them at least.’

‘But he carried on taking money after David went missing! How the hell does Steve justify that?’

‘According to Steve, he was trying to return the card when I caught him in the study that day after David had gone missing.’

There was nothing but contempt on Steph’s face when she said, ‘He couldn’t have tried very hard.’

Steve’s confession had sickened Jo and she could barely repeat his excuses. ‘He says that when he started taking out more cash, it was to help me. He used it to pay for decorating the nursery.’

‘£300 for a pot of paint? I hope you’re not falling for any of this. He took your coat, Jo, and kept it hidden so he could use it to creep around impersonating his brother. He even used his left hand to throw us all off the scent, for God’s sake, and the only reason you caught him out was because he was too drunk the second time to remember. It’s not just theft, it’s callous and cruel because it gave you hope that David was still alive.’

Jo gave a broken laugh. ‘He actually tried to convince me that it was an act of kindness because it made Irene and me feel better. And when I didn’t fall for that one, he tried to say how his dad’s death had affected him as deeply as it had the rest of the family – but I swear, Steph, if there was one person who actually agreed with Alan’s last words about family being a burden, it was Steve.’

‘So is he still trying to say he thinks David left of his own accord or … not?’

The residual anger left Jo’s body with a sigh. ‘I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him. I think he believed what suited him at the time, but then I can hardly blame him for that.’

‘You can’t, but the police can. Have you phoned them yet?’

‘I couldn’t while I was at Irene’s. She’s absolutely devastated.’

‘She’s not taking Steve’s side, is she?’

Jo shook her head. ‘No, she’s as desperate as I am to get the search started again. We’ve wasted so much time.’

‘Yes, we have,’ Steph said. She was already reaching for the phone.

The angelic child that Jo had brought home from his grandmother’s house a few hours earlier was reacquainting himself with his vocal chords and his screams were deafening. Up until that point, she had been so proud of herself. It had been a gruelling day but one she had faced without once hesitating at the front door, not even when she had left to go to the police station to make a formal statement. While the flimsy world she had created to make sense of David’s disappearance lay in ruins, Jo had somehow remained standing. But now, as she watched her son turn bright red with fury, she felt an old fear returning – how could she be a mother to this baby, the one whose conception she had been blaming for driving her husband away as much as she had blamed herself?

‘I’m not falling at the last hurdle,’ she told him in the gentlest of voices that belied the tremble in her throat. She patted the baby’s arched back in a slow, steady rhythm and willed her pulse to do the same.

Like a bottle of soda being agitated, Jo could feel the bubbles of panic rising in her stomach so she retreated to the nursery and waited for the sunflowers to begin their merry dance before settling into the rocking chair and attempting to give her freshly bathed son his last bottle before bedtime.

‘I remember the first time I ever saw your dad,’ she whispered when Archie stopped crying momentarily to explore the teat of the bottle. ‘He was wearing …’ Jo tried to summon up the image in her mind.

The meeting had been in Nelson’s boardroom and Jo had chosen a seat closest to the door while David had been hemmed into the corner. All eyes were on him as he tried to explain his ideas for some project or other. He had been wearing a suit, possibly dark grey, and perhaps a white shirt. She couldn’t recall, and for a moment this made her sad, but then she remembered the most important thing. ‘He was wearing a smile,’ she told Archie. ‘Not a big cheesy one, it was more of a mischievous grin and he aimed it at me. What could I do? I cut him down and wiped that smile off his face, but your dad was a glutton for punishment. He kept coming back for more.’

When Jo returned to the present, the lullaby was still tinkling in the background but it was the long, satisfied gulps coming from Archie that took her by surprise. The baby’s eyes were heavy but he was looking directly at her. ‘So why didn’t he come back this time?’ his gaze asked.

‘I don’t know, Archie,’ she said, ‘but I really believe that he would come back to us if he could.’

The thought that something bad had happened to David ought to have terrified her as much, if not more so, than in those early days. She remembered quite vividly that sensation of having her heart torn out of her chest and ice-cold fear pumped into her veins. It was a feeling that would undoubtedly return, but for the moment she was in the eye of a storm. After months of denying her true feelings and learning to despise the husband who had abandoned her, Jo felt such a pure rush of love for the man she had given her heart and soul to, that it took her breath away.

27

‘It’s a straw,’ Jo said, pointing out the obvious when Heather handed it to her.

They were having lunch at the Neighbourhood Café the day after Steve had made his confession. Jo had selected the same table where she had met Simon but today there was no desire to look out of the window and scan every face, no flutter of expectation that a passer-by would turn and give her that enigmatic smile. She wasn’t searching for the man who was capable of turning his back on his wife and child because he didn’t exist. There were, however, more practical considerations for choosing the table. It was the easiest place to park the pram. Archie had just been fed and, with a little help from Heather, was now sleeping peacefully so his mother could enjoy her own lunch in peace.

‘I’ve come across a relaxation technique called straw breathing,’ Heather told her. ‘You breathe in through your nose and then out through the straw. Try it.’

‘Erm, I don’t think so,’ Jo said with a half-smile.

Heather raised an eyebrow. ‘It’s to regulate your breathing. You’ll need to practice but once you’re confident then whenever you feel yourself getting panicky you can use it.’

‘So when I’m back at work and start to feel anxious, you really think I’m going to sit there with a straw in my mouth? Do you not think making a fool of myself will make me even more stressed?’

‘It’s not the only technique,’ Heather said. She handed Jo a plastic folder crammed full of printouts from various websites. ‘There are tons of other ideas in there, and I’ve also ordered a couple of self-help books that have had really good reviews.’

Jo took a sip of coffee as she mulled things over. ‘I’m not sure I need them any more.’ She was as sure as she could be now that whatever had happened to David, he wasn’t coming home. As she let that thought settle, she held on tightly to her coffee mug and pretended not to feel the tremor coursing through her body.

‘Jo, you’ve got to take it slowly. You said yourself that your anxiety doesn’t always have to have a rational reason behind it.’

Shrugging, Jo said, ‘I’m not saying I’ve completely got my act together, but after yesterday I feel as if I can face anything. I must have looked like a raving lunatic when I attacked Steve, but that was justifiable.’

‘I don’t blame you – and if anything I’m in awe of you. I don’t know how you held it together.’

‘I know. But I did. Enough to make it up with Steph and then go through everything Steve had told me with the police,’ Jo added with a note of pride.

‘And bring Archie home.’

‘Ah, but that was the easy part,’ Jo said as if the fraught bedtime drama had never happened. ‘I couldn’t have left him there with Steve in the house and at the time Irene was in a worse shape than I was.’

‘How is she?’

‘Still in shock, I think. She phoned this morning to say that she’s told Steve to leave. I hope she follows through with it because I don’t want her looking after the baby if he’s there. Not that I have any other real option if I’m going back to work next week.’

‘You can’t go back now!’

‘I have to. My maternity leave ends and while I suppose I could get signed off sick, I wouldn’t do that. I could only imagine what Kelly would make of it and besides, it’s bad enough that my home life is in limbo, I can’t deal with my working life being put on hold too.’

Heather didn’t look convinced. ‘But what about the police investigation? If they reopen the case—’

‘They already
have
reopened the case,’ Jo corrected.

‘So things are going to be more stressful for you in the short term at least.’

Jo wanted Heather to stop there and then. She didn’t want to be told that she might be asking too much of herself. Heather was the one she was relying on for encouragement. If she had wanted a dose of realism, she would have phoned her mother. Heather caught the look and responded to the unspoken plea.

‘All right, maybe going back to work is a step in the right direction. It will give you something else to focus on and at least it gets you into a routine of leaving the house, but you’re going to have to find some time for exercising too. It’s another way to boost your mental health.’

Jo pulled back her shoulders to make room for her expanding confidence. ‘I walked all the way here,’ she said.

‘So now we need to build up your energy for the walk home,’ Heather said, picking up a menu.