The Loving Husband (37 page)

‘So Nathan did tell you things,’ Fran said, letting her lift him. Miranda frowned, working out how to hold him as he writhed. ‘The minimum. Threw me a bone now and again. He knew I’d cause trouble if he didn’t,’ and she sat, parking Ben on her knee.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Fran, remembering the phone message, after their wedding. ‘I wish I’d known.’

Miranda was examining her, curious, over Ben’s head. ‘To be honest,’ she said, ‘until I knew there were kids involved, I’d have stayed away from Nathan for the duration.’ She compressed her lips. ‘The policeman said they’d be along,’ she said. ‘Gerard, that his name?’

‘Yes.’ Next time Gerard walked into her kitchen, she’d have reinforcements. It was a good thought.

‘They want to talk to me,’ said Miranda, thoughtful, and Ben’s head turned to look at her, hers to look at him and then she did look like Nathan, after all, that sharp clever look.

‘You know Nathan better than anyone, I suppose. Knew him.’

Miranda made a dismissive sound. ‘No one knows Nathan,’ she said. ‘And that’s just how he likes it. Liked it.’ Gently Fran took Ben from her, and Miranda put two hands to her head. ‘Shit,’ she said, in wonder. ‘He’s really dead, isn’t he? It’s really happened.’

The sound came from outside, and she knew it was them. Fran was getting to know the sound of the police car on her gravel. The first thing they’d see as they pulled up was, BABY IT’S YOU.

‘Where’s Ali?’ she said, straight away, because it was just the two of them. At the sight of them Emme had disappeared back into the sitting room, quick and quiet as a cat. Gerard held Fran’s eye, frank, open. ‘Did you want her?’ he said, earnest, fishing out a mobile. ‘I’ll give her a call if you like, was there something—’

‘It’s all right,’ said Fran, stiffly. ‘I wanted to know about Rob. What have you … have you found his … have you found anything yet?’

An exchange of glances. Gerard examined his hands a minute then looked up. ‘The divers started first thing this morning. We think we have, yes.’ Hesitant, his eyes clear and honest. ‘Something’s trapped, it’s taking a while to free it, but when we do…’ He paused. ‘Unfortunately there’s no next of kin that we’ve been able to trace.’ Again he looked down at his hands. ‘Might you … I mean, if it comes to it…’

She shook her head in horror, thinking of his raw hands, his pale waterlogged flesh,
poor Rob, poor Rob
, thinking, Why are they asking me this? ‘No,’ she managed. ‘I don’t think … couldn’t you ask someone at the hospital? A colleague?’

‘Yes, of course, I do understand. And I can see … yes, I’ll talk to Ali, I can see that she … that you might need her support.’ Fran felt Miranda move restlessly, impatient in her seat. ‘She’s got a bit of a family crisis herself at the moment,’ said Gerard, adopting a sympathetic face.

‘Someone wrote something on my car,’ she began, then Miranda was between them.

‘Where would you like to talk to me?’ she said, briskly. Unafraid.

Gerard pulled out a chair. ‘May I?’ he said, and he was looking at Miranda not Fran. He sat. ‘We could just go over a few things here, if you like. As a preliminary.’ A sharp nod to Carswell, who planted himself awkwardly across the table and got out his notebook. They both glanced at Fran, then away.

‘I’ll be next door,’ she said, shifting Ben to her hip, ‘Leave you to it.’ Gerard barely turned his head back to acknowledge she’d spoken, so she said, ‘You know where the kettle is, don’t you?’

Emme was cross-legged in front of the television. Fran turned the sound down so she could hear and Emme just shifted closer to the screen. Fran sat with her back to the door and listened.

Their voices rose and fell, interrupted by chairs shifting, the kettle going on. They were talking about Black Barn.

‘You heard it all, right?’ said Miranda, when they’d gone.

They were in the sitting room and Emme was in the corner bent over a puzzle, apparently absorbed. Fran could see her sister-in-law eyeing the low ceilings, the big draughty grate. When she said nothing Miranda went on, conversationally, ‘It’s all right, I’d be the same. They struck me as a bit thick, those two. The police. Do you think it’s a strategy?’

‘Gerard’s maybe,’ said Fran, nervous, as if of a trap, but couldn’t stop herself. ‘Carswell’s thick for real.’

Miranda sat down on the sofa and peered forward. The Helmut Newton book was there again, open on the coffee table. A naked woman with big breasts, Amazonian in high heels. Had they left it there? Fran couldn’t remember: she didn’t even know how they’d come to own it and now she couldn’t slam it shut and put it back on the shelf without looking guilty.

But then Miranda closed it, swift and casual. Ben started at the clap of the heavy pages, and stared at Miranda in admiration. ‘Never liked Helmut Newton,’ she said. ‘Old perv.’ Fran laughed in surprise, a sharp sound, and Miranda turned to her. ‘Why did you marry Nathan? Actually, that’s what they asked, too. What I thought of you. I said I didn’t know you at all.’

She wasn’t going to tell Miranda why she’d married Nathan: the thought made her weary. She’d married him for the same reasons anyone ever got married, fuck it. It wasn’t a crime. It had been a mistake. You had to assume you could make a life together. You had to believe you wanted the same things. Nathan had given her good reason, holding her hand at scans, stroking her hair in bed, talking about the countryside and how they were going to make a new life for their children. All lies.

‘They asked you about Black Barn,’ said Fran.

‘He looks like Nathan,’ said Miranda, frowning at Ben.

‘So do you.’

‘We were nothing like each other,’ Miranda sighed, rubbed her eyes. ‘He was such a beautiful kid, it was my favourite thing to do, look at pictures of my big brother as a baby. I worshipped him.’

‘There was something about him,’ said Fran, blinking.

‘Oh yes, he could make you feel like you were the only person in the world. Make you believe anything. Charm, I suppose you’d call it, but it felt like being hypnotised. My dad’s a cold bastard but at least you can see it, you can stay away. Nathan had the charm laid over the top. He used it to make people do what he wanted, whatever the hell that was, power, or something, and he just walked out of their lives when they weren’t useful any more.’

‘Like Bez?’

‘Like all of us,’ said Miranda, and her mouth turned down.

From behind the door Fran had heard her talk about Black Barn. She had opened the door a crack to hear more.

‘I was the kid sister,’ Miranda had said to Gerard in the kitchen. ‘Six years between us, I was twelve, playing with dolls still. I tagged along once, he was furious. I didn’t know anything about what went on there.’

‘Your parents didn’t discuss it? What he was getting up to at Black Barn?’ That was Gerard, she heard urgency in his voice.

Miranda had scoffed. ‘They were the sort to keep any discussion behind closed doors.’ There had been a pause so long Fran had wondered if Carswell had got up and closed the door. ‘Our parents should never have had kids,’ Miranda had said eventually, without inflection. ‘They were cold people. I think all they were worried about was Nathan bringing shame on us. They were happier when he disappeared completely, after.’

‘Do you know where he went? After Black Barn?’ Gerard spoke softly but the urgency was still there.

‘I knew he went to London for an interview. That was all. It was Rob told me, his friend Rob.’ A murmur. Gerard to Carswell, the scrape of a chair.

‘Then he just went off the radar,’ Miranda had gone on, her voice flat now. ‘I didn’t hear from him again for ten years, and suddenly five years ago he sent me an email. I was working in Germany then, I was at a bank in Frankfurt. He sent me a link to his webpage, he told me he’d been at college, got some qualification, and now, just like that, he’s some kind of builder. Gave me his mobile number, an address in north London.’ A quick laugh. ‘He hadn’t changed that much, though. Told me he’d got married in a text, six months later.’

‘And he didn’t tell you what he’d been up to since he left home?’ Gerard probed.

‘No, I told you,’ she said, urgent. ‘I knew someone he’d met at Black Barn got him that interview, gave him a leg-up. Whatever it was, it took him off the radar, he never looked back.’ Gerard had gone quiet then.

Now Fran stood up under the living room’s low beams, and shoved the big book of photographs back into the shelves, high up. ‘There were police involved at Black Barn,’ she said. ‘A senior policeman.’

Miranda looked up at her, as if she hadn’t registered what she said. ‘I never worried about him at Black Barn,’ she said, forlorn, and for a second Fran saw the kid sister behind her eyes. ‘I knew he’d survive.’

‘Only he didn’t. He didn’t survive this time.’

Miranda stood up. ‘I want to see the house, I want to know what’s so special about this place. To bring Nathan back here.’

In the corner Fran saw Emme go still. ‘I’m just going to show your auntie Miranda around a bit,’ she said.

Miranda noticed the trapdoor into the attic straight away, stopping and looking up: the ladder was still leaning against the wall under it. ‘It’s got that smell,’ she said, her mouth turning down, the back of her hand to her nostrils. ‘Don’t you smell it?’ Fran tipped her head back. Old wood, the powdery scent of mould and something else. The air around those heaped possessions in the dark roof space, a creeping staleness. For a moment they stood under the trapdoor, both holding their breath – then they walked on. Into the spare room, where she’d found the figurine with its porn breasts, as if Miranda knew.

‘The one time I went to Black Barn,’ Miranda said, on the threshold, ‘I didn’t even go inside. I had the same feeling. I smelled the same smell, dirty sheets, old socks, dry rot, maybe, I don’t know.’ She walked on into the room, to the window, and stood there, her back to Fran.

‘I clean my sheets,’ said Fran, but her voice felt lighter than a whisper and Miranda didn’t seem to hear.

‘It was a place where bad things could happen,’ she said. ‘Were happening. I got to the door, I’d gone on my bike. It was all overgrown, a sweltering day, I remember the river too, the way it smells in the heat, all green and cold.’

‘Green’s not a smell,’ said Fran.

Without looking round Miranda said in an undertone, ‘Some things you need more than one sense for, you can taste them, you can feel them.’ Her voice had risen a notch, breathless. ‘I heard something in the house, some groaning sound, someone laughing, high-pitched, and I just ran. I tripped over my bike in the lane and I thought I would die if I had to stay there.’ She drew her fingertips closer on the glass. ‘It was just right for Nathan. Like this place, maybe. A place where Nathan could feel at home, king of the castle, and the rest of us don’t even want to cross the threshold.’ Beside her Fran nodded, unseen. ‘It’s men on their own,’ Miranda continued, ‘left to their own devices. That’s the smell.’ Then she turned. ‘You’ve got a visitor.’

The car the policewoman pulled up in was battered and ancient. She didn’t bother to lock it, she just stood at the kerb and looked up at them, at Miranda.

‘That’s Ali,’ said Fran. She stepped into Ben’s room to put him down and heard Miranda on the stairs, heading for the kitchen, or so she thought. But Fran was halfway down when she heard it, a loud grating and a shudder, and turning at the bottom she saw that Miranda, in her ignorance, had gone to the front door, and had somehow miraculously managed to get it open. Ali Compton was standing on the snow-dusted grass in front of the house, bewildered.

‘I just,’ Ali said, faltering as she looked around, ‘I just…’ She was wearing a battered weatherproof jacket and the same sweater as before only with a spatter stain across the bottom, as if someone had thrown food at her.

‘Gerard said you had trouble at home,’ said Fran, and Ali made an impatient noise and then was next to her, a hand on her elbow.

‘I just needed to know you were OK,’ she said. Miranda folded her arms across her body, weighing Ali up. ‘You and the kids.’

‘I…’ Fran felt it come up in her throat, the thing she had been fighting so long to keep down. ‘I need to…’

‘We need to talk,’ said Ali, and although neither of them looked at her, Miranda said, ‘I’ll put the kettle on, shall I?’

It had to be upstairs. Not just because it was where it had happened. Fran wanted to put doors between her and anyone who could overhear. Miranda and Emme; she didn’t even want Ben to hear.

Ali closed the door behind them, looking around the room in the low pale light falling through the long windows. Fran sat on the bed, feeling suddenly completely alone, no Nathan, no Emme, no Ben. There was something in Ali’s face that made her avert her eyes.

‘I found a load of stuff in the attic,’ she said, mumbling. ‘I found John Martin’s wife’s stuff up there, and he’s still around. Where is she? Is she out there, is she in a ditch somewhere?’ She looked up and Ali’s eyes were wide. Fran swallowed. ‘Is she under the concrete in that barn, and Nathan worked it out?’

‘You think John Martin killed him?’ Ali said, and her voice was flat.

‘Gerard said the tights they found outside belonged to a woman with convictions for soliciting,’ she said, pushing it away, the thing she really didn’t want to say. John Martin’s stiff hair, his sliding eyes.

‘I know that,’ said Ali quickly. ‘DC Watts brought me up to date on her. The woman – she’s called Gillian Archer.’

They’d told her that. Gillian. Jilly-Ann. This felt like the wrong conversation, somehow. They were each skirting something, not wanting to go there. ‘What about Black Barn?’ Fran said, faltering. ‘Would John Martin have known about the place? Would she, his wife? Someone died there.’

‘He might have done,’ Ali said, grim-faced. ‘Depends what kind of sex he was after. I remember that. I remember that girl. The one that died at Black Barn.’ Fran raised her eyes to Ali, and she couldn’t keep it in any longer.

‘He came into my bed,’ she said in a monotone, and Ali’s face changed.

‘Who?’ she said sharply.

‘The man who killed Nathan, the man who came into my bed. I wasn’t asleep. We … he came into my bed and we…’