The Loving Husband (5 page)

‘A woman,’ she said, grasping at the fact, and he nodded.

‘I’d have liked to have had a female officer along last night but…’ He smiled. ‘It’s not like visiting your GP. We can’t guarantee … in an emergency situation.’ He hesitated, eyeing her over the mug and then Fran felt a tremble, as if her body was getting away from her.

‘I told you there was a man there,’ she said. ‘I did tell you, didn’t I?’ The tremor grew, her hand on the table shook. ‘Let me show you, now, I can show you where.’ She pushed her chair back, wanting to get up, but he held up a warning hand. ‘He wasn’t afraid,’ she said, urgent. ‘He was just watching me. He came after me to the window.’

‘Yes.’ Gerard didn’t move. ‘You said you didn’t see his face.’ She subsided.

‘Did you find anything? The man. There was a man.’ She tried a different tack because he didn’t seem to be registering. ‘Do you have any … he was at the pub. He came back from the pub. The Queen’s Head.’

‘We’ll talk to them.’

‘What about … criminals?’ She didn’t know what she was imagining, someone recently released from prison. The world was full of violent people, and she hadn’t known it, until she found herself in the field. Ghosts roaming the dark. ‘Is there anyone known to you?’

Gerard’s gaze was steady. ‘Well, we’re considering a number of possibilities. That’s part of the job, yes. There are hardly any itinerants this time of year, though, there’s a spike in crimes associated – seasonal workers, that kind of thing, although we can’t, we don’t draw any automatic conclusions—’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Fran, desperate. ‘Are you talking about … traveller communities? Or … or … migrants? I’m not racist, I’m not suggesting—’

His expression was flinty, and she stopped.

‘I’m sorry.’

He nodded. ‘We look at burglaries in the area, we’ll find a trail that way often, a spate of them, they go from house to house but in this case…’

She looked around, wildly. ‘Were we burgled?’
Someone in the house.
‘I don’t … I don’t … nothing has gone, that I can see…’

DS Gerard lifted a hand. ‘As I was about to say,’ he said, mildly, ‘there was only one report of a break-in last night and that was the other side of Oakenham, likely enough only kids anyway, by the sound of it.’

Fran stared at the table, head down. ‘Right,’ she said, almost a whisper. ‘So you haven’t caught anyone.’

‘The first few hours are crucial, for gathering evidence,’ he told her and she felt him examining her face. ‘You’ll have heard that.’

She barely shook her head. ‘I don’t know anything. This … nothing like this has ever happened to me before.’

There’d been a police raid on one of Nick’s clubs a couple of months after they’d started going out. He’d been called out at three in the morning to deal with it and had come in again pale and tight-lipped as she was getting out of bed, making coffee. ‘Bastards,’ was all he’d say. She’d been at that club with him the night before: it was a classy place, restored to the original Edwardian fittings, tiny tables round a polished dance floor, each one with a little lamp and an old-fashioned phone.

Little booths upstairs: she could remember it as if it was yesterday suddenly, though she hadn’t thought of the place in years. They’d sat in the gallery looking down on the dancers, with champagne in a bucket, and he’d told her about his plans. He’d gone to talk business with someone in the office and she’d gone down to the dance floor. An hour or so later she hadn’t stopped, flooded with the feeling and forgetful of where she was or why she looked up and there he was. Watching her from above the carved wooden balustrade, and when she looked up he had smiled.

Nick wouldn’t let her near the club while the police were there – it was closed for eight days. He’d gone voluntarily to the police station to talk to them but he wouldn’t let her come and collect him when they’d finished. She’d never even talked to a policeman, but was that a brush with the police? She’d forgotten all about it, until now. They’d dropped the charges eventually, whatever they were.

They’d walked past that club one day, she and Nathan, with a newborn Emme in the buggy. It had closed down and he watched her, as she paused to examine the fly-posters that plastered the boarded doors. She had never talked to Nathan about Nick, or about how it had ended, but he had put an arm out, around her shoulders as she stood there. ‘You don’t mind,’ he said, ironical, ‘your boring married life?’ She’d leaned her head against him. He had known, without her having to tell him. It seemed so comforting.

Gerard was looking at her, as if he could see the thoughts in her head. Nathan’s arm around her. Their boring married life, far off as if through the wrong end of a telescope.

‘Of course,’ Gerard said, ‘we’ll also need to talk to you about your husband’s own contacts, social life, work … his movements last night…’

There was a tap at the door and Carswell’s head appeared round it. He looked like a teenager. Gerard nodded to him and he slipped inside. ‘Detective Constable Carswell,’ he said, bobbing his head to her.

Fran made as if to get to her feet but Gerard put a hand on her arm in a second. ‘He can make his own.’

‘Little one asleep?’ said Carswell, his back to them at the kettle. ‘My sister’s got one tharr’age.’ He didn’t seem to expect an answer.

‘Did your husband have friends out here?’ Gerard asked. ‘Old friends? Lads he went to the pub with?’

She shrugged, helpless, yes, of course. Nathan must know people, he at least left the house every day, he visited sites, worked on estimates. Overhead came the sound of Emme’s footsteps, and she set up a tuneless singing. ‘He went to the pub for a bit of peace and quiet,’ she told them, and DS Gerard nodded.

‘New baby and all that,’ he said, sympathetic. ‘It’s a difficult time, isn’t it?’

‘We’re … we were…’ She started again. ‘This was what we wanted. Kids. Getting away from London. We were happy.’

‘But no friends yet?’

‘There’s Rob, Rob Webster. An old friend of my husband’s, he lives out here. The other side of Oakenham.’ Gerard nodded to Carswell, who wrote in a notebook, painstakingly. ‘He works at the hospital, in some lab or other. His number’s on my phone, only I don’t know…’ She looked around, wildly. ‘I think Nathan put it up there by the landline when we moved.’ She’d insisted, remembering her mother’s scrawled list when she was a child. What parents did: doctor, dentist. Gerard nodded and Carswell got to his feet and was behind her at the phone. She didn’t turn to look.

Rob was tall and awkward, his skin almost blue-white for an outdoors type, his knuckles raw from mountain-biking. Still a boy, he seemed to her. ‘This … all this…’ She had her hand to her mouth suddenly. ‘He’s Nathan’s … he was our best man.’ And all she could remember was Nathan’s hand falling on Rob’s shoulder, introducing him.
I’ve known this guy for ever
. His best friend.

‘I’d better call him,’ she said.

‘We can do that,’ said Gerard. ‘Don’t worry. It might be better, coming from us. He might know something.’ He tilted his head. ‘What about any other friends? Of your husband’s?’

She shook her head, uncertain. Rob, Nathan’s only friend. Was that unusual? For a man to have just one? At the wedding, along with a handful of girls from the magazine, she’d dredged up three or four from school, they’d turned up dutifully. She hadn’t seen any of them since, maybe she’d never see any of them again but she’d been glad to have them there. When she’d been going out with Nick, he seemed to have dozens of people he called his mates. Nathan had had Rob, and a couple of people he worked with. Julian Napier, he was one of them. Her brain wasn’t working.

Watching her, Gerard hesitated, the mug between his hands. ‘Tell me something,’ he said, his voice level, calculating, to the sound of Emme’s footsteps coming back down the stairs. ‘I’m interested.’ He was almost a head taller than her, and stood between her and the door. ‘You’ve been married how long, four, five years?’ She nodded. ‘Why did you come here, you and your husband?’

‘Why?’ she said stupidly, hearing in his cool tone,
Go back where you came from.

He smiled then, as if to reassure her.

‘I mean,’ he said patiently, ‘why here?’ Tilted his head. ‘Why now?’ He left it a long moment before saying, ‘More space, was it?’

She just stared. ‘For the kids?’ he said, prompting her.

‘My husband’s from round here. He grew up not far away.’

They’d visited the bleak little village with its boarded-up shop only once since they moved, at Emme’s insistence, to see the house he’d grown up in. It was a small cottage with moulting thatch almost down to the ground, tiny windows and low ceilings, and Nathan had stood a moment with his hands in his pockets, frowning at it before saying, ‘That’s it. Nothing to see really.’ And marched them back to the car.

‘And we love it here,’ she said. ‘The house, and everything.’

Gerard was watching her.

‘So that explains why your husband wanted to come here. What about you?’

They hadn’t come here for more space: they’d only had Emme when they moved. And she didn’t think they’d have another child.

‘Everything all right, otherwise?’ said her GP at the six week check. ‘You and your husband?’ The health visitor had asked the same question after going through a questionnaire with her when Emme had been a week old. ‘What are your feelings about the way the birth went?’ A neat blonde woman with a bouncy stride, she read the questions from a clipboard, intended to check for post-natal depression, though she never said so, and Fran had answered everything with determined cheerfulness. ‘Yes, yes. Fine.’

And unless they meant, are you having sex again yet, it
was
fine, wasn’t it? She couldn’t imagine having the conversation with anyone but Jo, but Jo didn’t come, she sent an expensive dress with a card tucked into the tissue paper:
Congratulations!!
Two exclamation marks, which was so not Jo it was as if she’d been made to write it at gunpoint and was sending a covert message.
Love, Jo. X
.

Her mind wandered, late at night, on the brink of sleep, or sometimes if they were watching some movie or other, it didn’t even have to be a sex scene though the first time it happened that was what it was. A man kneeling in front of a woman was all it took, her hands on his shoulders, stroking his neck, his face turning up to look into hers and Fran had to close her eyes a second, so vivid was it, so sudden. A hotel bedroom with a long window open, rain outside on a dark lake and the exact feel of Nick’s hair between her fingers. Hearing the pleasure sound, some explicit gasp from the box, Nathan had glanced up at the television screen from his laptop then back down while Fran had just kept still, the heat rising at her neck.

Then there’d been a night when she reached for him in the dark where he lay with his back turned to her; sliding an arm across she felt the muscle of his belly go taut. His hand had come up quickly and taken hers, holding it still. He had murmured something like a warning and when she understood she had pulled the hand back and lain flat, her heart thumping.

‘Let’s go shopping,’ she said to Jo on the phone, trying for cheerful. ‘Nothing fits at the moment.’

She’d thought, when they were alone together, squeezed into a changing room on Jo’s lunchbreak and laughing at some terrible outfit, it would come naturally. It would be like old times. But with Emme parked in the corner gazing at the bright lights and Fran frowning down at her little soft roll of belly and at the buttons on a pale, soft, perfect, beautiful silk shirt that, besides being dry-clean only, wouldn’t do up over her chest, she couldn’t quite come up with the right words, somehow.

Jo caught her looking down at herself, and cleared her throat. ‘Fran,’ she said, wary.

Fran hadn’t been bothered by the belly, those first weeks and months, it was part of the deal. Then one evening she’d been reaching up for something in the kitchen and her shirt had come untethered from her jeans and there’d been something behind her, a sound, from Nathan, and she’d had to sit back down, tugging at herself. Although when she looked up he was only smiling. Loving.

‘Fran,’ said Jo. ‘Look. Is everything all right?’ And at the reluctance in her voice Fran had to look away, grabbing her trousers from the floor. She was going to be asked something she didn’t want to answer, or told something she didn’t want to hear.

‘All right?’ she said, dressed and decent again. ‘Oh yes,’ and then, stupidly bright, ‘It’s been so lovely, doing this, even if … well, the weight’ll come off, I just have to relax. It’s been just like old times.’

She geared herself up to talk about it. But he watched her so closely, he knew her inside out, and hanging up his jacket when he came in from work he seemed to know what she was going to say even before she finished the sentence. ‘We need to…’ she began. And suddenly he was there, right up against her, Emme between them, her small downy head turning, eyes looking unblinking from one of them to the other. He stroked Fran’s hair.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know, I know. I’m not sleeping. And it’s work.’ And he sighed and subsided on to the sofa, patting the space beside him.

‘What about work?’ said Fran, leaning against him. He rested his chin on her head.

‘Oh,’ his voice had a grim edge, ‘just … well.’

‘What?’ she said, keeping still.

He sighed. ‘A project I’ve been after for … oh, years now. Lots of bureaucracy, you know, all the permissions. I’ve put a lot of work into it. Putting together a tender, and someone’s thrown a spanner in the works.’ He took his chin away from her head and tilted her face up to him, looking into it, frowning. ‘Some jobsworth in the planning department. These people.’ And he got up quickly and got a bottle of wine that had been in the fridge for months. They hardly ever drank, these days. ‘So,’ he said when he came back, handing her a glass, taking a big gulp from his, ‘how was the baby clinic?’

He did seem interested, to give him credit, or at least he sat and listened while she talked, gaining in confidence, although she could hear herself, talking on. Moving from Emme’s weight and the health visitor’s approval to her own childhood, bedsits and head lice and moving schools. ‘Mum specialised in evading the authorities,’ she said at one point, and he let out a laugh, surprised.