The Loving Husband (21 page)

‘Where’s…’ She couldn’t remember Ali Compton’s rank, she realised. ‘Where’s Ali?’

‘She had to take a call. She’ll be outside. You want her? We can wait.’

Fran shook her head, though she did want her. ‘It’s in the newspaper. I didn’t know.’

‘We had to give out some information,’ said Gerard, apologetic. ‘It helps. People come forward.’

‘
Has
anyone come forward? What’s happening? Have you found anything out?’ She was angry, suddenly. ‘I don’t know what’s going on. You don’t tell me anything, you just follow me round like … like…’ She stopped. She took a deep breath. ‘The results of the post-mortem, for example. All I know is, he was dead by eleven. How did he die? I’m his wife. His wife.’ She had to stop again. Carswell was watching her with curiosity, a kid prodding some insect. ‘I’m his wife. I want to know.’

‘He bled to death,’ said Gerard, levelly. ‘The wound to the abdomen hit an artery. As Ali will have told you…’ he fixed her with a look that was almost a reproof, ‘the knife you found, the knife from your kitchen, seems certain to have been the murder weapon. The handle had been wiped, there were traces of your DNA on it but then it was your knife. As you did eventually confirm.’ The undercurrent of hostility was unmistakable.

‘What about the tights?’ She heard herself, stubborn, to conceal panic. ‘Don’t you think they … might mean something? He might have left them there? Meant to use them for … I don’t know.’

Gerard raised an eyebrow and she saw Nathan in him again.

‘Fran,’ he began, and she wanted to shout,
Don’t you ‘Fran’ me
, ‘I know you must feel helpless—’ and she began to shake her head.

‘No,’ she said but he went on, telling her.

‘Like there’s nothing you can do. You have to trust us.’

She said nothing then. Gerard pursed his lips, disapproving. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘well, we’ve had some joy there.’ He smiled stiffly. ‘There was DNA on them we’ve got on the database, as a matter of fact. A female we’ve got on record.’

‘On record for what?’

Carswell fidgeted. ‘Not murder, if that’s what you’re asking,’ said Gerard, gently. ‘No history of violence.’

‘What, then?’

He looked at her, weighing something up, then sighed. ‘A caution for shoplifting, two convictions for soliciting, a public disorder offence.’ He held his hands out, palms up. ‘Gillian Archer. We’re trying to trace her, the last address was Cromer, ten years back.’ He watched her. ‘Norfolk,’ he clarified.

‘Yes, I know,’ she said.

‘Why don’t you sit down a minute?’ he said. ‘I’d like to go over it again.’

‘I’ve left the baby upstairs.’

‘He sounds fine. Do you want to go and get him?’

She shook her head and sat down, quickly. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘He came to bed,’ said Gerard and she held her breath; she nodded quickly.

‘It wasn’t … I’d have known if it was a … an intruder, in my room. Wouldn’t I?’

He sat down beside her on the sofa, she felt the cushions give. ‘You’d be surprised,’ Gerard said, gently. ‘People tend to assume things they hear and see are normal. They look for a normal explanation first.’

She felt tears prick her eyes at the kindness in his voice. ‘I heard the change in his pockets,’ she said. ‘He got into bed.’ She shook her head, unable to speak.

‘Did he … ah … did he…’ Gerard hesitated. They were both looking at her, Carswell from the bookcase, restive, and instead of saying
Yes, yes, he did
, she shook her head, fiercely. Shame burned her. How could she have not known. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Gerard, ‘but I have to ask. So he got into bed and you went back to sleep. There was no … sexual contact?’

From upstairs there was a small thud, and a wail.

She stood up, stiff and hurried. ‘No, I’m sorry, I’ve…’ and he moved back on the sofa to let her pass.

Ben had rolled on to his front, was all. He strained to look up at her in panic, stranded, red in the face. She knelt to pick him up and found herself looking under the bed. She’d seen something, hadn’t she? For no reason she could fathom the thought that something, anything, some tiny scrap of packaging or nothing had been there and was now gone, filled her with panic, too. Fran scooped Ben up against her and leaning down she felt with her free hand, patting under the bed: nothing.

She sat back on her heels, flushed, and there was Ali Compton in the doorway. ‘All right?’ said Ali, anxious.

‘Fine,’ said Fran, restraining herself from looking again. It had been blue, metallic on the inside, like, like … all she could think of was the packaging on a pregnancy test, but it wasn’t that. Stiffly she got to her feet, looking for her mobile, then remembered it was in her pocket.

‘They haven’t found his phone yet, have they?’ she asked.

‘Not yet.’ Ali looked into the room, the long windows with the line of the horizon visible through them, the walnut chest of drawers that was all Fran had got from her mother, the big old bed they’d bought at an auction, Nathan looking exasperated as she bid on it. ‘No phone yet, it’s one of our priorities.’ The policewoman hesitated. ‘He just had the one? Phone.’

Fran stared. ‘Why would he need more than one?’

Ali Compton grimaced, just barely. ‘Some men do,’ she said. ‘If there’s stuff going on they don’t want their wife knowing about, for instance.’

Fran shifted Ben around, stood up and set him on her hip.

‘I’d guess the wife usually doesn’t know about a second phone, either,’ she said, tough. ‘I never saw one.’ She could see the study door, closing behind Nathan, before he’d leave for work sometimes, at night. She’d hear him in there after she’d gone to bed. ‘Someone removed his hard drive,’ she said. ‘Someone took his phone.’

Ben gurgled, reaching for Ali Compton, and she smiled, she held out a finger to him. ‘There’s things they can do to track a phone, if it’s active, but if it’s been destroyed…’

Ben took hold of the finger she held out, grasping it with determination, tugging it to his mouth. Half laughing, Ali Compton let him take it. ‘You got children?’ Fran asked, because the broad, kind face looked like a mother’s to her, but the policewoman shook her head tightly.

‘Just didn’t happen.’

Fran heard Carswell and Gerard at the foot of the stairs, waiting to come up, and suddenly she wanted out. She swung Ben round so quickly the finger was yanked out of his grasp, but she had the advantage of surprise. He didn’t start crying till they were past the men and she was picking up the car keys from the hook inside the kitchen door.

Out.

The trolley rolled out of her grasp in the supermarket car park and she had to catch it before it bumped into the car’s tailgate. She stopped, staring at the word written in the streaked dust.

Fran had no idea how long it had been there; she hadn’t looked at the car in days. Climbing in an hour earlier she hadn’t gone round to the rear, she’d just strapped Ben in, flung herself into the driver seat, and off.

It could have been there days. Would the police have told her if they’d seen it? It was innocuous enough.

YOU

Fran had told them in the kitchen, blunt, almost as an afterthought as she got to the door, that she had to get food. ‘I hope you’ll be done when I’m back,’ she’d said, before she could stop herself.

DS Doug Gerard had said, courteously, that he totally understood, that they’d do their best and she’d felt guilty then, turning away quickly to the car before she could say,
Whatever, never mind.

She looked around herself at the sea of cars, the wide flat landscape beyond. There were people moving between the cars, couples, mothers wrestling with toddlers, men on their own with a single carrier bag, but no one turned to see her.

YOU

All around her the dull gleam of cars under the huge low sky.

It hadn’t really been food she’d come for. Standing in the frozen food section, where she found a mobile signal, Fran had dialled the number of the magazine. She still knew it by heart. The sound of the receptionist’s greeting, ‘Bartle Pawson Publications, can I help you?’ with that rise to the voice at the end, brought tears to her eyes, instantly, a whole other lost life springing up in the desert of glass-fronted cabinets and frozen chicken thighs, a world of packed streets and cafés and desks and work. Work.

‘Joanna Sinclair, please.’

‘Who’s speaking?’

Did she think, when she’d hung up, that there’d been an intake of breath when she gave her name? ‘I’ll try the number for you.’

In the event the assistant didn’t miss a beat. ‘No, sorry, she’s out of the office until tomorrow morning, that’s why you’ve been put through to me. Can I leave a message?’

Anger fired inside her, so sudden that she had to fight to make her reply civilised. It could be true. Give her the benefit of the doubt. Fran asked the woman’s name. Camilla.
If you don’t mind just saying I called, Camilla? Fran Hall. That’s great. Thank you, Camilla.
Seething. She hadn’t known this was inside her, all along: rage.

Then it was rage that powered her through the aisles, shovelling stuff into the trolley – milk, bread, meat, fruit – and it was when she found herself beside the bananas (she hated bananas, Nathan lived on them,
had
lived on them) that she came to a halt. She had taken a breath and gone back, more slowly, replacing things on the shelves. She had no appetite, none. Nathan was gone. Coffee, she needed coffee. One bottle of wine, then she even put that back. Smile at the woman on the checkout. Keep moving, get back to the car, then you’re on home ground, then you’re safe. Except she wasn’t.

In the trolley Ben had caught on to something in her sudden silence and he was straining to sit up out of the straps. In a quick movement she leaned down and with her sweatshirted forearm wiped the word out. She didn’t give a fuck if it was evidence. She had the right.

Emme? Emme wouldn’t have written
You
.

Strapping Ben into his seat she slowed, aware of his eyes following her. He looked so like Nathan: the dark hair, the eyebrows, a certain severe, disapproving look, but she felt her heart lurch, because he was hers now, only hers. She leaned down and kissed him beside his ear. She felt his hand come up, inquisitive, to tug at her hair and she kept her face there patiently, breathing in his smell. Had Nathan wanted them, either of them?

Uneasy, Fran straightened, disentangling Ben’s hand. The morning after his conception Nathan had gone down to make her a cup of tea while she lay there in unexpected sunshine with her eyes closed, just basking in it, not quite able to believe it. And of course she shouldn’t have believed it, because it didn’t happen again – but then Ben was on the way. Not quite a miracle. Luck, chance, unimpeded biology: he had been planned. Something stirred, a suspicion.

And there in the cramped car, that was his car, that still harboured his smell where her bed no longer did, she tried to see Nathan’s face. Tried to imagine it, there were bits of it, but it wouldn’t come and before she could stop it the outlandish idea ballooned in her head, making her heart beat faster, faster, the crazy idea that it wasn’t the man in her bed who’d been a stranger, it was Nathan she didn’t know.

Beside her on the passenger seat the phone rang. ‘Mrs Hall?’ That disapproving voice, June Rayner. Emme’s school. ‘She’s talking about a bad man,’ said Rayner.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming to get her now.’

The bad man.

Emme at three, almost four, dancing around the kitchen with the kite’s tails getting tangled in the chair legs. ‘Come on, Daddy, come
on
.’

Their Saturday mornings had been a routine from quite early on. That September had been bright and warm and the wide flat fields had some colour at last, golden stubble and dark low hedges, the strip of poplars turning yellow and fluttering, thrilling gold and silver in the low constant wind. Every Saturday Nathan would take Emme off after breakfast.
Exploring
, Emme would say, gleefully secretive.

Left behind in the echoing empty house, Fran would walk through the rooms, shifting things, wondering when it would feel like home. There was a hatch into the loft at both ends of the long corridor upstairs and she’d stand and stare up at it, estimating the great length of the space above them in the steep pitched roof, and what could be done with it.

‘Once you get rid of the rats,’ Nathan had said, with that curt laugh, and then he had frowned at her dismay, because she hadn’t known that’s what the sound was, the skittering and clicking over their heads. ‘All old houses have them,’ he said, dismissive. The next day he came back with poison for them, delighted at what the countryside had to offer: unlicensed chemicals and old-fashioned hardware stores. The scratchings and scuttlings did stop, for a while.

In November it got sharply cold, fresh turning to bitter, and with the hardening of the weather at night the sounds in the attic returned, the clicking and scuttling. Fran, pregnant by then, had to wind the two of them round and round with scarves and coats before she’d let them go. She’d felt reluctant that day, she was heavy and slow on her feet. The Saturday they stayed out late.

The sunlight had been thin and brief and the house was cold, a chill hung in the corridors. When they weren’t back by two Fran went upstairs in a sulk, lay down and slept. She woke three hours later to find it almost dark, and them still gone. Sitting up on the bed for a moment she didn’t even know where she was, the grey half-light made everything unfamiliar, furniture mounded under heaped clothes, the outline of the curtains furred and dim, and there was a strange smell coming from somewhere.

Sweetish, almost rich, for a moment she thought she must have left something cooking and as she stood to get off the bed it cloyed in her throat, her stomach heaved. She padded downstairs and the smell was there too, warm and diffuse, it evaded her. She had to try not to imagine carcases boiled down, bones stripped for dog food. As her insides rebelled Fran held still, gripping the banister till it all settled. It could be something to do with being pregnant, she told herself, phantom scents, hypersensitivity. Or – as the smell seeped in cold under the kitchen door and seemed to metamorphose from animal to chemical – it could be something spread on the fields. Where were they? Sliding her feet into boots, feeling the grit in them, Fran pushed at the door.