The Loving Husband (33 page)

‘Maybe leave the kid behind for that one,’ he said, and the smile was gone as quickly as it had come. ‘Lose our licence that way.’

And then abruptly he turned his back, opened a door in the back of the bar and she glimpsed a rectangle of striplit kitchen, a row of catering jars on top of a fridge.

‘Ray’ll be in at three thirty,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘He’s old enough to remember the summer of love, first time around.’ But before she could even say
thanks, Eric was through the door and it was closing behind him.

Outside, she scanned the grey car park but it was empty as she walked across the gravel with Ben clamped tightly to her. The sky was low and white with cloud and the air freezing and clammy, the chill crept up on her even between the pub door and the car, seeping under her coat, up inside the cuffs of her sleeves. There was moisture inside the car windows, and she could see her breath as she strapped Ben in.

Keys. She sat there with them in her hand, turned to check on Ben but he seemed stunned by the cold, strapped in his padding, his eyes black and round. Fran heard the car pull in alongside them, on the passenger side, and still she sat there with the keys in her hand, she didn’t turn to look.

The other car’s engine turned off and she leaned her head back against the seat. The door opened and he was inside.

She closed her eyes and there was his smell, of what she didn’t know but she’d know it in the dark, the ghost of sweat, washed cotton and shaving foam, with it she recalled the texture of the skin below his chin, the roughness against her cheek. The breadth of his hand. When she opened her eyes again there was his shoulder as he looked back between the seats at Ben. He turned back and when he smiled she saw the lines beside his eyes, the lines that hadn’t been there in the old days.

‘Needs a dad, now, doesn’t he?’ he said, quietly, turning back to look at her, his eyes narrowing as he did, and he lifted a hand to her face, she felt the warmth of it as he rested it against her cheek. Quickly she brought her own hand up to stop him.

‘He’s another man’s kid,’ she said. ‘Would you want that? Would you, Nick?’

He hadn’t spoken to Fran the first time: he’d just stood on the bridge and watched her there, pregnant in the sunshine, with Emme in the buggy beside her. She’d lifted her hands to shade her eyes, so that she could be sure of what she was seeing, though she already knew. She knew Nick’s haircut, she knew his jacket, the angle of his shoulders, and recognising it all Fran had felt her body propelled upright and towards him on the bench, her belly momentarily forgotten until she shifted forwards over it. Then she stopped, catching her breath, warning the baby against the sudden movement,
careful
.

Nick was leaning on the bridge’s parapet but as she moved forwards he lifted his hand in a half-wave, awkward, nervous, shy as she’d never seen him. And then he had turned and walked off, jerky and anxious, and she was almost on her feet to call out and stop him, or run after him. But she hadn’t called after him. She hadn’t run. She had only wanted to.

It was a week later that he sent her the first message.
I miss you
.
She’d deleted his contact but she hadn’t blocked his number: a shrink would probably say that was a dead giveaway. And when the number came up she knew it straight away.

She left it ten days before she answered.
How did you find me?

Of course, it hadn’t been like that, or so he said. And besides, he could have found her easily enough if he’d wanted to – she wasn’t hiding, was she?

He had stroked her belly, the week before Ben was born. He’d set his cheek against it. It seemed to her by then that Nathan was actually averting his eyes from her, never mind feeling her belly, but still she stepped away from Nick abruptly when he touched her.

‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ he had said when she recoiled, and he seemed genuinely hurt, his eyes dark.

‘I don’t know if Nathan would see it like that,’ she’d said. ‘I can’t see you, Nick.’

The snow was beginning as she drove back with Ben behind her in his seat, although Fran didn’t notice it at first, it was so fine, like dust in the greying afternoon. She parked along the side of the house. Slowly she put a hand up to the button that locked all the doors

The car that had pulled up next to her in the car park of the Angel had been dark and big and solid but nothing special; no more top-end Range Rover with tinted windows, no more chauffeur-driven Italian job with doors that opened the wrong way and leather seats.

‘I’m done with all that,’ he had said to her the first time they sat down together, a month after she saw him on the bridge. Five weeks, not that she was counting, not that she found herself on her weekly visits to Oakenham hunting out something decent to wear, circling back always to the bench by the river. They were in a coffee shop down a lane behind a church, a big dark tree shading the window. Nick took her there, he already knew it.

‘It was … that wasn’t me, Frankie.’ He ducked his head as he said it, ashamed – which she supposed was to his credit. ‘I’m a businessman now, pure and simple. I’ve had enough of the rest of it.’ Averting his eyes. ‘One way or another I’d be dead by now if I hadn’t got out.’

He told her he’d been there more than a year. ‘Cheap storage, cheap property. And there’s a market for clubs out here in the middle of nowhere like you wouldn’t believe. I’ve got a chain of them, up as far as Hull. End-of-date beer, off-season guest DJs, it might not be glamorous, but it’s a foolproof formula. It’s hard work.’

She stopped him when he started telling her where he was living – it seemed dangerous. The next step would be him asking her if she’d like to see it. ‘So I came out here before you did,’ he said abruptly, and looked mystified, on the edge of wonderment at the miracle that had brought them back together.

He had looked tired, he had looked as if he’d spent two years tracking up and down from the Wash to Lincoln to Wisbech, sorting out premises and security, back to an office in a warehouse on the edge of town where he stored his speaker stacks and decks and props and whatever else.

‘I was out of my depth,’ he had said back then when she’d first seen him again, in the coffee shop in Oakenham he’d led her to.

Helpless, when she turned on him as he’d put his cheek against her belly to whisper the words, and she’d shoved her chair back and said, ‘You do remember, don’t you? Why I left you?’ The girl in the coffee shop had turned at the loud sound of the chair against the floor and given them a look.

Ben was wide awake in the back of the car: something beyond the window fascinated him, perhaps the tiny particles of snow, barely visible, just a glitter in the low light.

Someone had seen them, someone had told. The girl in the coffee shop. Of course. Long before the press conference, Nathan’s death, someone would have whispered, saw that Londoner. Saw her with a man. And it seemed to her in that moment of revelation that Nathan had known it all too, Nathan who watched her, who knew her. Nathan knew Nick was here, before she did.

But that was stupid. How would he know? And why would he have let her go, urged her to go, if he had?

‘What do I have to do,’ Nick had said to her, ‘to show you? I love you. There’s only ever been you.’

The snow was beginning to dust the hedges; she had passed a gritting lorry miles back on the Oakenham ring road, but nothing since.

Known what, anyway? What did they all think they knew? Because she hadn’t slept with Nick. And that was what an affair was, wasn’t it? Loving someone, wanting to touch him, remembering the smell of his sheets in the morning and the sound of his humming in the shower – that wasn’t an affair.

And was it rape, if you didn’t know it at the time?

With Ben asleep behind them in his seat Nick had gone very quiet when she told him: the first person she had told. The person who wouldn’t judge.

‘Did you enjoy it?’ Nick’s voice had been so low she barely heard it and then, as if he’d felt what she felt, all her limbs going rigid at the question, he went on quickly, as if he hadn’t said it at all, ‘I suppose the question is, were you in a position to give your consent?’

And he had looked down at his hands, as if at a loss. The ice they tiptoed across was thin, it cracked under them.

‘He must have just killed Nathan,’ she said then, in a voice odd and bright and clear in the enclosed space of the car. ‘Murder trumps rape, doesn’t it? I mean. Why should I scream and shout because a man screwed me while I was half asleep, when Nathan got murdered? That shouldn’t make me feel guilty, should it? That shouldn’t make me feel ashamed, should it?’ Her voice was getting higher and thinner, and she stopped, dead.

For a second as she glanced sideways at him, saw his hands, the fabric of his coat, the ghost of stubble on his chin in her head, she was scrabbling to get out, to get away from him. A man, a man, a man, he touched me, a man.

‘You didn’t tell them, then,’ he said. ‘You didn’t tell the police, about the sex.’

‘You don’t know,’ she said then, numb with horror. ‘You don’t know what it’s been like.’

From where she was parked now Fran could see the lit windows of the school beyond the gates, and the dark shapes in the playground. She thought of the big solid shape of Nick’s car beside her tinny battered one; she thought of him sitting in the passenger seat next to her, warm and familiar; and then she thought of the cold unlit house waiting for them, she remembered that the boiler was on the blink. She would only need to say a word or two, to put out her hand, and she wouldn’t be alone. She felt drained, hollow.

‘Hey!’

The voice, rough and close and the rap of knuckles loud against the window, made her heart race. She started forward and then she saw it was Karen, and she had Emme with her.

In the end Ali resorted to waiting outside for Sadie to come off shift. There wasn’t a desk for an FLO in the incident room and there’d been no sign of her anyway. She’d stood for a bit looking at Gerard’s scrawl on the whiteboard, arrows and rubbings out and names. Teamwork, was what it was supposed to be about.

Ali looked at her phone: almost five. She’d told Mum she’d be there by half past, at the latest – had written it on a post-it by the clock. Christ knew what chaos would ensue if she was late, having written it down. Adrian had promised, reluctantly and with the trophy wife bleating in the background, that he’d be there tomorrow evening. Would stay over.

Martin Beston wasn’t top of the list of names, nor was Rob Webster. Gerard had breezed past her on his way up there, to the reservoir. ‘I’ll keep you posted, DC Compton,’ he said. ‘Ed’s stopping here, if you need to … go over anything.’ A smirk from Ed Carswell.

‘Where’s DC Watts?’ she asked, and the men shrugged at each other.

‘You send her out for sweeties again?’ said Gerard.

Gerard might have been picking his spots at the other end of the country when rumours were going around about Black Barn that summer, but Ali had grown up five miles away from the place, and even though she’d been off doing her training when it was closed down, it would have been her first port of call in this investigation. So how come Nick Jason was top of Gerard’s list?

Half an hour’s googling on her phone in the car park had told Ali that Nick Jason owned Club Sound Logistics, the warehouse on the Sandpiper estate opposite Nathan’s empty office, so Gerard knew that much, and hadn’t bothered informing Ali.

Nathan had been watching Jason, not the other way around. But as an idea began to form, the sliding doors opened and there she was.

‘Sadie,’ she said. ‘DC Watts.’ A shifty look: Ali knew what this was about. It was about different ways of handling Doug Gerard, and getting on, and who knew? Sadie’s was probably cleverer. Head down, mouth shut, ears open. ‘I get it,’ Ali said, wearily. ‘I get it. I won’t tell him you’ve said a thing. But let’s suppose he’s wrong about that woman taking a knife to her husband – I’m all she and her kids have got. So tell me. About Nick Jason, and what Nathan Hall was up to.’

Sadie Watts set her mouth in a line.

‘All right, Sadie, how about I tell you what I think?’

Fran was on the ladder under the trapdoor to the attic when it came back to her in a rush, it raised a prickle on the back of her neck.

Nick had mentioned it almost as an afterthought, diffident, cautious.

‘I saw him, you know,’ he said, and he’d looked down at his hands, relaxed in his lap. ‘Of course, I didn’t know it was him, I didn’t know it was Nathan, your Nathan. Alan Nathan Hall, according to the paper.’ He looked up then. ‘I saw him where I keep my stuff. The warehouse. The Sandpiper.’

It had been Karen that had put it out of her mind, leaning down at the window to take charge, all brisk and refusing to take no for an answer. ‘Out you get,’ she said. Plumber’s on his way. Got him on speed-dial, as a matter of fact, he’s got a bit of a soft spot for me. Snow coming? You can’t just leave it.’

And that had been the next couple of hours taken care of, the blessing of not having to think, just for a bit. There had been tea to be made and the plumber in her kitchen within a half-hour, a big bashful man eyeing Karen with wonder as she sat at the table with her plump, soft, manicured hands round a mug.