The Widow (21 page)

‘It's a lot to take in, Jean,' he says kindly. ‘All a bit sudden, but it's what we all hoped would happen, isn't it? You've waited a long time for this moment.'

I raise my head, but he doesn't look me in the eye. We don't speak again.

I keep thinking about that poor young officer, pretending to be a woman to try and get to the truth. I'd thought he'd acted like a prostitute when Tom told us about the evidence, but when I watched him in the witness box with everyone laughing at his act, I felt sorry for him. He would've done anything to find Bella.

When Glen comes out, Tom goes to him and shakes his hand again. Then we leave. On the pavement, Dawn Elliott is weeping for the cameras. ‘She'll have to be careful what she says,' Tom says as we hover by the doors at the back of the mob. She's bathed in light from the TV cameras and the reporters are tripping over power cables, trying to get near her. She's saying she'll never give up looking for her little girl, that she's out there somewhere and she'll find out the truth about what happened to her. When she finishes, she's led away by friends to a waiting car and is gone.

Then it's our turn. Glen's decided to let Tom read his statement. Well, Tom advised it. He wrote it. We step into the spotlight and there's a noise that physically shakes me. The noise of a hundred voices shouting at once, firing questions without waiting for answers, demanding attention. ‘Over here, Jean,' a voice near me hollers. I turn to find out who it is and the flash goes off in my face. ‘Give him a hug,' another says. I recognize some of them from the pavement in front of the house. I go to smile, then realize they're not friends. They're something else. They're the press.

Tom is all serious and quietens everything down. ‘I'm going to read Mr Taylor's statement. He's not going to be answering any questions.' A forest of tape recorders rises above heads.

‘I am an innocent man who has been hounded by police and deprived of my liberty for a crime I never committed. I'm very grateful to the court for their decision. But today, I'm not celebrating my acquittal. Bella Elliott is still missing and the person who took her is still out there. I hope the police will now get back to finding the guilty person. I would like to thank my family for standing by me and I would like to pay a special tribute to my wonderful wife, Jeanie. Thank you for listening. I would ask you to respect our privacy now as we try to rebuild our lives.'

I look at my shoes throughout, filling in the gaps in my head.
Wonderful wife
. This is my role now. The Wonderful Wife who stood by her husband.

There's a single silent beat, then the noise deafens again. ‘Who do you think took Bella?', ‘What do you think of the police tactics, Glen?' Then a passer-by shouts, ‘Well done, mate!' and Glen grins in response. It is the picture everyone uses the next day.

An arm snakes through the cameramen and hands me a card. It has ‘Congratulations' on it and a picture of a bottle of champagne with a cork popping. I try to see who the arm belongs to but it's been swallowed up, so I slide the card in my bag and am guided forward with Glen and Tom and some of the security people. The press come too. It's like a swarm of bees moving in a cartoon.

That journey home is a taste of what is to come. The reporters and photographers block the way to the taxi Tom has got waiting for us and we can't move forward. People are pushing each other and us, shouting their stupid questions into our faces, shoving their cameras everywhere. Glen has my hand and he suddenly makes a break for it, dragging me behind him. Tom has the door of the taxi open and we throw ourselves on to the back seat.

Cameras are slammed against the windows, flashing and banging, metal on glass. And we just sit there, like fish in an aquarium. The driver is sweating but you can see he's enjoying it. ‘Bloody hell,' he says. ‘What a circus!'

The journalists are still shouting: ‘What does it feel like to be a free man, Glen?', ‘What do you want to say to Bella's mother?', ‘Do you blame the police?'

Of course he does blame them. He stews over it, the humiliation and the baby-doll pyjamas. Funny how he can think about that when he's been accused of killing a little girl, but getting even with the police becomes his new addiction.

I
'VE ALWAYS WONDERED
what it would feel like if I let out the secret. Sometimes I daydream about it and can hear myself saying, ‘My husband saw Bella the day she was taken.' And I feel the physical release, like a rush to the head.

But I can't, can I? I'm as guilty as he is. It's a strange feeling, owning a secret. It's like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it. My friend Lisa used to talk about being pregnant like that – the baby pushing everything out of its way. Overwhelming her body. My secret does that. When it gets too much, I switch to being Jeanie for a while and pretend the secret belongs to someone else.

But that didn't help when Bob Sparkes was questioning me the first time, after Glen's arrest. I felt heat rising through my body, my face red and my scalp pinpricked with sweat.

Bob Sparkes was trespassing in my lie. ‘So what did you say you did on the day Bella disappeared?'

My breathing became shallow and I tried to catch and control it. But my voice betrayed me. It became a breathless squeak, a deafening dry gulp as I swallowed mid-sentence. I'm lying, my treacherous body was saying.

‘Oh, in the morning, work, you know. I had a couple of highlights to do,' I said, hoping the truths in my lie would convince. I was at work, after all. Justify, justify, deny, deny. It ought to get easier, but it doesn't as each lie feels sourer and tighter, like an unripe apple. Unyielding and mouth-drying.

The simple lies are the hardest, funnily enough. The big ones seem to just fall off the tongue: ‘Glen? Oh, he left the bank because he has other ambitions. He wants to start his own transport company. Wants to be his own boss.' Easy.

But the little ones – ‘I can't come out for a coffee because I've got to go to my mum's' – stick and stutter, making me flush. Lisa didn't seem to notice in the beginning, or if she did, she hid it well. We were all living in my lie now.

I was never a liar as a child. My mum and dad would've been able to tell immediately and I didn't have a brother or sister to share a secret with. With Glen, it turned out, it was easy. We were a team, he'd say, after the police came round.

Funny that. I hadn't thought of us as a team for a long time before that. We each had our departments. But Bella's disappearance brought us together. Made us a real couple. I always said we needed a child.

Ironic really. You see, I was going to leave him. After he was released by the court. After I knew all about his online stuff. His ‘sexcursions', as he called them, in the chat rooms. The stuff that he was going to put behind him.

You see, Glen likes to put things behind him. When he says it, it means we'll never talk about it again. He can do that, just cut off a part of his life and let it drift away. ‘We need to be thinking of the future, Jeanie, not the past', he'd explain patiently, drawing me closer, kissing my head.

It made sense when he said it like that and I learned never to go back to the things we'd put behind us. It didn't mean I didn't think about them, but it was understood that I wouldn't mention them again to him.

Not Being Able to Have a Baby was one of the things. And Losing His Job. And then the Chat Rooms and all the awful things with the police. ‘Let's put it behind us, love,' he said the day after the court case ended. We were lying in bed; it was so early the street lights were still on, shining through a gap in the curtains. Neither of us had slept much – ‘Too much excitement,' Glen said.

He'd made some plans, he said. He'd decided to get back to a normal life – to our life – as quickly as possible, to make things like they were before.

It sounded so simple when he said it and I tried to put all the things I'd heard out of my mind, but they wouldn't go. They kept hiding in corners and leering at me. I stewed for a few weeks before I made a decision. In the end, it was the pictures of children that made me pack a bag.

I'd stood by him from the day he was accused of Bella's murder because I believed in him. I knew my Glen couldn't do something so awful. But that was over now, thank God. He'd been found Not Guilty.

Now I had to look at the other stuff that he did do.

He denied it all when I said I couldn't live with a man who looked at pictures like that.

‘It's not real, Jeanie. Our experts said in court that they're not really kids in those pictures. They're women who look really young and dress up as kids for a living. Some of them are really in their thirties.'

‘But they looked like children,' I shouted. ‘They do it for people who want to see children and men doing those things.'

He started to cry. ‘You can't leave me, Jeanie,' he said. ‘I need you.'

I shook my head and went and got my bag. I was shaking because I'd never seen Glen like this before. He was the one who was always in control. The strong one.

And when I came downstairs, he was waiting to trap me with his confession.

You see, he told me he'd done something for me. He said he loved me. He knew I wanted a child so badly it was killing me, and that was killing him, and when he saw her, he knew he could make me happy. It was for me.

He said it was like a dream. He stopped to eat his lunch and look at his paper in a side street and saw her at a garden gate, looking at him. She was alone. He couldn't help himself. When he told me, he put his arms round me and I couldn't move.

‘I wanted to bring her home for you. She was standing there and I smiled at her and she put her arms up to me. She wanted me to pick her up. I got out of the van, but I don't remember anything else. Next thing I was driving the van home to you.

‘I didn't hurt her, Jeanie,' he said. ‘It was like a dream. Do you think it was a dream, Jeanie?'

His story is so shocking, I'm choking on its details.

We're standing in our hallway and I can see our reflection in the mirror. It's like seeing it happening in a film. Glen is bending down so our heads touch, sobbing on my shoulder, with me deathly pale. I'm patting his hair and shushing him. But I don't want him to stop crying. I'm afraid of the silence that will follow. There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don't want to know.

Glen stops after a while and we sit on the sofa together.

‘Shouldn't we tell the police? Tell them you saw her that day?' I ask. I have to say it out loud or my head will burst. He stiffens beside me. ‘They'll say I took her and killed her, Jeanie. And you know I didn't. Even seeing her will make me the guilty man, the man they put in prison. We can't say anything. To anyone.'

I sit, unable to speak. He is right, though. Seeing Bella would be as good as taking her as far as Bob Sparkes is concerned.

I just keep thinking Glen can't have taken her.

He just saw her. That's it. He just saw her. He didn't do anything wrong.

He's still gulping from the sobs and his face is red and wet. ‘I keep thinking maybe I did dream it. It didn't feel real and you know I wouldn't hurt a child,' he says and I nod. I think I know, but really I don't know anything about this man that I've lived with all these years. He's a stranger, but we're bound together tighter than we've ever been. He knows me. He knows my weakness.

He knows that I would've wanted him to take her and bring her home.

I know that I caused all this trouble with my obsession.

Afterwards, when I'm in the kitchen making him a cup of tea, I realize he didn't use Bella's name, as though she isn't real to him. I take my bag back upstairs and unpack my things while Glen lies on the sofa watching football on the telly. Like normal. Like nothing has happened.

We don't talk about Bella again. Glen is very nice to me, telling me he loves me all the time, checking up to make sure I'm all right. Checking on me. ‘What are you up to, Jeanie?' he says when he rings my mobile. And so we carry on.

But Bella is with us all the time. We don't talk about her, don't mention her name. We carry on as my secret starts to grow inside me, kicking at my heart and stomach, making me throw up in the downstairs toilet when I wake up and remember.

He was drawn to Bella because of me. He wanted to find a baby for me. And I wonder what I would've done if he had brought her home to me. I would've loved her. That's what I would've done. Just loved her. She would've been mine to love.

She was almost mine.

Glen and I still shared a bed afterwards. My mum couldn't believe it. ‘How can you bear to have him near you, Jean? After all the things he did with those women – and that man?'

Mum and I never talked about sex, normally. It was my best friend at school who'd told me how babies were made and about periods. Mum wasn't very easy talking about things like that. It was as if it was dirty, somehow. I suppose Glen's sex life being in the papers made it easier for her to say it out loud. After all, everyone else in the country knew about it. It was like talking about someone she didn't really know.

‘It wasn't real, Mum. It was all make-believe,' I told her, not catching her eye. ‘It's something all men do in their heads, the psychologist said.'

‘Your father doesn't,' she said.

‘Anyway, we've decided to put it all behind us and look to the future, Mum.'

She looked at me as though she was going to say something important, but then stopped.

‘It's your life, Jean. You must do what you think best.'

‘
Our
life, Mum. Mine and Glen's.'