The Loving Husband (14 page)

Gerard had said, don’t touch anything: had that included showering? Tracking down her own phone? He’d meant Nathan’s study, and obediently she hadn’t even opened the door. Now she wished she had.

The neck of her sweatshirt was damp, her hair twisted up but still wet. Doug Gerard examined her. He was good-looking, she found herself thinking with a shock. His eyes were grey. ‘Hey, Mrs Hall,’ said Carswell, giving her his best eager smile. Gerard looked impatient, just at the sound of Carswell’s voice. She wondered how long they’d worked together, how they got on, outside work.

‘Did you talk to the landlady?’ she said, breathless, and saw them exchange glances.

‘Yes,’ said Gerard, slowly. ‘I think we need to go over that with you.’

‘Who was he with?’ she said, folding her arms across herself stubbornly. ‘Have you got any names?’

‘It’s … it looks a bit more complicated than that.’ Gerard frowned. ‘Mind if we have another look in that study, if that’s all right with you?’

She didn’t move. ‘Fine,’ she said, and they wandered off together, closing the door into the study behind them.

She had hardly started on the washing up when they were back, Gerard first through the door and frowning.

‘Where did you say
your
computer was then?’ he said, casual, and she shifted on her feet.

‘It’s being fixed,’ she said, alarm bells going off, why was he asking? ‘You want it? Nathan took it in months ago, he took it to that place in Oakenham…’

Something had got spilled on the keyboard, though she didn’t remember doing it. Fran had used to keep it on a table in the bedroom and one morning she’d sat down on it to check her emails and found the keys sticky, then it wouldn’t turn on. ‘I’ll take it in,’ Nathan had said, then, ‘Yeah, I’ll pick it up next time I’m over that way,’ then, ‘Guy says he’s still working on it.’ She’d mentioned getting a new one but he’d turned away, clearing his throat. ‘Maybe when the work starts coming in. And there’s data.’ Frowning. ‘On kids’ exposure to computers at home. All sorts. No harm in keeping them away from keyboards as long as possible, hey?’ And he’d smiled, that brilliant smile that changed everything.

She shook her head. ‘I can use my phone for most of it.’

Though that was less and less, under Nathan’s gaze. ‘What are you doing?’ he’d ask, sharply. ‘Who’s that?’ Plus she hardly got emails any more except from marketing companies, catalogues, the occasional bright round robin from Carine or someone who didn’t matter. Jo’s replies to any enquiry had got sporadic and dispiritingly brief, Fran had given up. Before the laptop gave up the ghost, she had had a guilty, painful habit of trawling back down through the inbox for old correspondence with Jo, when emails had run to pages, filled with exclamation marks, pictures and links attached. In some ways it had been a relief not to be able to do that.

‘It’s nice not to depend on the internet,’ she said, dully. Spouting Nathan.

Gerard turned to look at her and she shrugged under his gaze, uncomfortable as she felt the past five years lapping up against her. ‘You must have used his now and again?’ Gerard said, and she stared at him, as if he should have known how that would have gone down with Nathan. ‘Did you not even go into his study? Poke around, just natural curiosity?’

‘He was … he liked things like he’d left them,’ she said, and Gerard chewed his lip.

‘Fussy, was he? But still. Check his pockets now and again? Wives generally like to keep tabs.’ There was sourness in the look he gave Carswell, before he turned back to look at her and pulled out a chair.

‘Tell us about your husband’s friends, for example,’ he said, and she stared.

‘I told you about Rob,’ she said.

‘The others, though,’ he said and she began to explain, ‘He wasn’t that sort of—’ but the policeman interrupted her, leaning forward on the table, looking earnestly into her face. ‘I mean, when he went to the pub. You said he went a couple of times a week.’ He sat back. ‘He must have mentioned someone?’

‘There must have been others from way back, but I got the impression they’d all moved on,’ she said, desperate. Thinking. ‘There was this summer they all lived together. Squatted.’

‘Summer? Who lived together?’ said Gerard quickly, leaning forward.

‘Just lads. I don’t know. Their last summer before they all went their separate ways. Rob would know. There was someone – he said he’d heard he was still around, he said he might look him up. Something … did something in the trade, building trade.’ She put her face in her hands. ‘I’m sure I can remember if I just…’

‘All right,’ said Gerard, soothing again. ‘All right, yes. It’ll come to you. If it comes to you.’ And in that moment his manner grated on her, she wasn’t a child. She wanted to shake it off.

‘It’s the pub, you see,’ said Gerard.

‘You said it was complicated,’ she said, scenting something.

Behind him Carswell had been making tea and now he came around and set the mugs down in front of them before pulling out a chair on the other side of Fran. She looked from one of them to the other and for a second she had a mad impulse to stand up and shout and scream.
This is my kitchen. I want my life back.

‘It’s just, y’know,’ said Carswell conversationally, ‘she says he wasn’t in that night at all. The landlady says. In fact,’ and he turned the mug on the table in front of him, tilting his head to examine the logo on it, ‘she said he isn’t a regular, like. Seen him maybe a handful of times since you moved in?’

‘Do you think I’m lying?’ The words came out before she could stop them. Gerard’s eyes narrowed. ‘He went out a couple of times a week,’ she said, stiffly. ‘Thursdays and Sundays, usually. He said he was going to the Queen’s Head.’

Gerard’s face invited the thought.
So if you’re not lying, he was.

But what he said was, ‘And he’d usually come in, what sort of time?’

‘I told you. Not late. Around closing time, eleven, that sort of time.’

It was unreal, she had to stop it. She felt if she stood her head would hit the ceiling, things would go flying.

Gerard didn’t move, sitting back in his chair relaxed, contemplating the room, the sink, the stove, the row of mugs. ‘But this time it was later,’ he said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘Just trying, you know. To get the story straight, in my own mind.’

‘It’s not a story.’

‘You know what I mean,’ said Gerard, easily. She saw his gaze settle, and looked where he was looking.

She gestured with her free hand, Ben’s head asleep on her other forearm. ‘What’s that?’ she said, and he got to his feet, crossed the room and brought a bag across.

He pushed it towards her but she shook her head and peering inside he slid out a flat square box of expensive chocolates. ‘Huh,’ he said, surprised. Fran recognised the packaging, the French name on the box because she’d buy them for herself once in a while, way back when. In another life, in London. It was a small box, modest, but thirty quid’s worth of chocolate. Nathan.

Fran felt sick. ‘I don’t know where they came from,’ she said, and she could hear the edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘Has someone come round? Has someone been here? I don’t know.’

Carswell gaped.

‘Take them away,’ she said. ‘Please. I don’t want chocolates.’

Gerard stood up and handed the box to Carswell, who made to hide it behind his back and said, ‘Nice one, boss. You shouldn’t have.’ They were watching her. She felt their eyes unpicking her reaction.

She held herself very steady. ‘I need to call his family now,’ she said. Then, feeling their hostility like a wall, ‘If you don’t mind.’

They stood aside.

His family.

From the beginning Nathan had been … not evasive exactly, more, impatient; more, dismissive.

‘My dad’s … well,’ he had said abruptly, one evening, Fran five months pregnant and suddenly looking it, and they’d been talking about getting stuff, laughing on the sofa about whether he could put a cot together. ‘You get to a point, don’t you, when you see what they’re like. Really like.’ Warily Fran had nodded, because she did know, because she’d got to that point fairly early, with her mother. Her dreamy mother, who would rather have been a sister than a parent.

Nathan’s mother was in institutional care: she’d been bedridden for more than two years, unable to feed herself for five. He went there to see her three or four times a year, he said. Thinking of her own mother Fran had asked if she could come with him but he had been categorical. ‘They say she’s losing the ability to swallow,’ he had said, coming back the last time. So there was only really his father.

‘A miserable bastard, is what he is,’ Nathan had said, and she remembered him getting up, then pacing, sitting down again. And when eventually Nathan took Fran up there, at her insistence, she saw that a miserable bastard was exactly what he was, now at least. John Hall lived in sheltered housing in a village near where he’d been born on the north-eastern coastline, near somewhere called Alnwick. It was high and blowy but beautiful, and the one-bedroom bungalow was comfortable, but he grumbled about it. Staring in disgusted disbelief at the handrails, elbowing Nathan out of the way with silent hostility when he tried to wash up.

‘Told you,’ said Nathan, climbing cheerfully behind the wheel for the long journey back. And when they told him they were getting married and he announced he couldn’t come, not with his hip, he was waiting for the op, she hadn’t protested.

She had, though, supposed that Nathan’s sister would come: Miranda. Because that was what this was for. Having no family of her own, unless you counted cousins she hadn’t seen since she was a toddler (after her mother took her to Greenham Common in a sling and was arrested they had been more or less disowned as an embarrassment). There needed to be someone beyond the two of them, beyond the half-dozen friends. Nathan, though, had just shrugged. ‘She’s on secondment to the office in Seoul for a month. She can’t get leave, she’s in the office at six every morning, weekends. It’s that kind of job.’ She was something in finance, selling emerging markets, whatever that meant. ‘Couldn’t she … They fly round the world all the time, don’t they? In that kind of job?’ And when he just shrugged, ‘I’d just like to meet her,’ she said, and had heard herself, plaintive, needy.

‘No,’ he said, and his voice had been hard for a second, before he softened it. ‘I’ve tried.’

So it had been just the handful of them, the sharp-suited developer trying to pick Carine up on the registry office steps and Rob, shifting to get out of Julian Napier’s booming orbit.

This man
, said Nathan in the Italian restaurant after, as he settled an arm on Rob’s narrow shoulders,
has known me for ever
. Rob had blushed at that, but whenever Fran thought back to that afternoon, Rob was always blushing.

At one point – the table by then a litter of coffee cups and the dregs of crazy drinks – Nathan had got up to go to the bathroom and Jo, whom Fran thought had gone home, had slipped into the seat beside her. ‘Seems like a nice guy,’ she said, nodding towards Rob. ‘Not that I could get more than a couple of words out of him. Kind of a sweetheart, though?’

‘Sure,’ said Fran, watching him as he fiddled with his phone, shy, anxious. Nathan protected him: she liked that. That was the place Rob had. ‘To be honest, I probably know about as much about him as you do. But yes.’

The edge rubbed comfortably off her elegance after the hours at the table, Jo had sighed. ‘This is what you want, though,’ she said, frowning. ‘That’s all I care about.’

She’d felt grateful for the concern she heard in Jo’s voice. But she hadn’t thought, Why is she so worried? At the bar Nathan was smiling, talking to the developer, he’d taken off his tie and looked young. Exhilarated. ‘Yes,’ said Fran, because in that moment, Emme in her arms and Jo sitting next to her, it was true. Who could tell the future, anyway? Sometimes you just had to jump.

Back in the flat, half out of her uncomfortable dress, Fran had sat with Emme on the sofa, settling her. Nathan was in the bedroom moving around for a bit and soon there was silence, although she heard the ping of his phone once or twice. When finally she pushed the bedroom door open, at close to eleven, he was asleep on the bed, his face turned to the wall. His clothes were folded neatly on the chair, his phone was on the bedside table by his head, its screen face down.

With relief Fran stripped off the dress and stuffed it into the washing basket, although she never wanted to see it again. Her flesh was marked where it had dug in at the waist. Motionless as a log, Nathan let out a snore and then before she could think about what she was doing Fran was padding around to his side of the bed. Picking up his phone.

She looked at the messages. There was one from Julian, the construction bloke.
Nice do. See you Thursday
.
She had thought he was in Leeds on Thursday. And the other one was from Miranda.

There was no message thread attached to either. But Miranda’s was a response to something.
I don’t believe you
, it read. Indignant.
A bit of warning might have been nice. Address? So I can at least send a present?

‘I tried,’ he’d said. But he hadn’t.

Absently she rubbed the screen to clean it, she could see her fingerprints, then realising what she was doing she set it down in a hurry. Had he even read the messages? If he hadn’t, he’d know someone had. That she had.

But when he looked up at her from his cereal the next morning, dressed and neat and shaven with the phone on the table beside him as she wandered in dishevelled with Emme in her arms, he didn’t say anything about it.

She opened her mouth to ask, any word from Miranda? But then he’d have known she’d looked at his phone. And besides, maybe there were reasons, maybe she just needed to be patient and he’d tell her why he hadn’t wanted his sister at their wedding, why she didn’t know where they lived. She didn’t want to get up from the breakfast table and challenge him.

To stand up with Emme in her arms and say, you lied.