The Missing Husband (42 page)

‘I’m so sorry, Jo,’ he continued. ‘I’m sorry that we gave up so early on. I should have pushed for the resources I needed to do a thorough search of the area, beyond the fence rather than just the path.’

‘You weren’t the only one to give up too soon,’ Jo said, prepared to admit her own culpability even though she wasn’t yet strong enough to deal with it.

‘The one thing we’ve yet to clear up is exactly what role Daniel and his mates played. We only have their word for it that they ran off before David fell from the tree.’

Jo looked up and when she wiped her eyes the waterproof mascara she had chosen specifically for an occasion such as this refused to smudge. She gave an undignified sniff. ‘I don’t think Daniel was lying,’ she said. ‘In fact, I’m sure of it.’

Martin took out a pack of tissues from his pocket and handed them to Jo. ‘And I think I’d agree with you but you’re going to have to prepare yourself for some speculation, if not from us, then from the press.’ He left a pause before continuing. ‘There’s something else too.’

‘Tell me.’

‘The mystery shopping bag David was carrying. It was Daniel who ended up with it because no one else was interested.’

‘And was it a present for the baby?’ Jo asked. It sounded like a plea for mercy and in return she caught the beginnings of a sad smile on Martin’s face as he nodded.

‘He said it was full of baby toys,’ Martin replied tentatively, testing Jo’s reaction.

Jo gave him a trembling smile and the courage to continue.

‘Daniel threw the bag over a gated entrance to one of the charity shops on Allerton Road. He described what sounded like bath toys and teething rings but the only item he could recall with any clarity was a cot mobile. It had sunflowers hanging from it.’

The smile broadened even as her pain deepened and the tears spilled down her cheeks unheeded.

‘And it played, “You are my sunshine”,’ she added with absolute certainty.

32

The sound of a running shower lured Jo from sleep but her eyes refused to open. She could taste the soapy, damp air as the door to the en suite opened and David stepped out. Her mind turned towards him but her body remained statue-still as she listened to him dress. She could hear him moving and then the creak of the door as he prepared to leave. She tried to speak but her lips were glued tightly shut and the words she screamed could only be heard inside her head.

‘Don’t go, David! Please! Please stay with me; I don’t want to live without you. I love you. Oh God, please listen to me! I love you so much. Don’t go, don’t you dare leave me!’

With her mouth sealed shut, Jo was struggling for air. Convinced she was going to suffocate, the panic began to build in her chest and she told herself to breathe slowly through her nose. The thin stream of air she managed to inhale was just enough to keep her lungs from exploding. Her ears pricked when she heard a noise. It was David moving towards her. She could smell his aftershave and then felt his warm breath on her cheek. She tried to open her eyes again and every nerve and muscle in her face strained with the effort. This was her last chance. David was going to be buried today in the graveyard with the perfect view of the valley. If she didn’t open her eyes now then she would never see him again. Her closed lids were quivering as she fought through her inertia and then, without warning, she felt herself fall. Her stomach flipped and her eyes snapped open.

The room was filled with bright sunshine that lit up David’s face like a halo. He smiled and the ice running through her veins melted away. He smiled and she marvelled at it. This was the very same smile that had stolen her heart – but then, she had received his heart in return. And as her loving husband trailed a finger along the side of her face, tucking away a rogue curl, Jo wondered how she could ever have doubted him.

‘I love you, David.’

‘And I love you, Jo,’ he said.

The smile easing across Jo’s face erupted into a full-blown grin that was smothered by David’s lips which were warm and needy. She kissed him back hungrily and, as she did so, she made the mistake of closing her eyes again. The darkness rammed into her and forced the air out of her lungs in a gasp as she snapped her eyes back open. It was too late. He was gone, and only the darkness remained.

Her eyes darted around the room. From the green glow of the alarm clock, she could see Archie sleeping peacefully in the bassinet next to the bed and he would remain asleep for some time. It was barely five o’clock.

Jo tried to concentrate on slowing her breathing but it was hard to ignore all the other thoughts running through her mind. Today was her last day of being David’s wife. She wasn’t going to think of herself as a widow, not until tomorrow. Only then would she try to start her life anew. Today she was still his wife.

When she managed a deep breath, Jo knew she was winning her latest battle. She could still detect a trace of David’s aftershave in the air. It wasn’t imagined, nor was it a lingering remnant of his ghostly apparition. There was no guilt or self-reproach for adding a sprinkling of his aftershave to her pillows as she had done every night since his body had been discovered ten days earlier.

Her legs were trembling when she eventually sat up and dangled them over the side of the bed. She felt defeated by the latest anxiety attack, but not surprised. The discovery of her husband’s body had brought no peace and, so far, no resolution. The mystery of the past had been solved but there were still those questions that would never be answered, the what-ifs and the what-might-have-been. What would they have been doing now? Would she have been a better mother to Archie? And what would David have been like as a father? As this last thought weighed heavily on Jo’s mind, Archie sighed deeply and twisted in his blankets. Grief wrapped around Jo and tried to pull her back beneath her duvet but she resisted. There was something she needed to do but she didn’t work out what that was until she found herself standing in the middle of the study.

With the window blinds pulled down against a night that wasn’t quite spent, Jo switched on a reading lamp which cast an arc of yellow light across the bare desk. There were no stacks of folders, not even a single letter left unfiled from the various banks, insurers, government bodies and other inflexible institutions who had once regarded her either with suspicion, pity or had simply ignored her when she had tried to manage her husband’s affairs. Jo had taken no pleasure in informing them that her husband was dead, but in some ways it had been cathartic. ‘Here’s your answer!’ she had wanted to yell at them. ‘Are you happy now?’

And it hadn’t only been in correspondence with faceless penpushers that Jo had felt this shift in position. Family and friends were finding it easier to express their condolences now that they knew exactly
why
they were consoling her.

Her return to work had been short-lived but there had been no question about offering Jo two weeks’ compassionate leave. Gary had arrived with a bouquet of flowers and a card signed by everyone as a token of their sympathy. Clearly a bereavement card was easier to come by than the one declaring, ‘Sorry your husband is missing.’ Kelly had sent her own card and the message inside had been sweet and sincere. Jo had a feeling that her assistant was starting to realize she still had a lot to learn, or was that being optimistic? Jo didn’t mind, a little optimism was good.

But it was Simon’s card that had moved her most of all. He hadn’t offered the usual platitudes. He had been honest and refreshingly blunt. He told her that he had no idea how she felt or how she would cope in the future. He had no way of knowing if the worst was over for her but he hoped it was. He was only certain of one thing. This too would pass.

Jo knew he was right but the future still frightened her. She couldn’t imagine ever being able to look at the path that lay ahead without being aware of the one running in parallel that she and David had been meant to follow together. She tried to visualize that untravelled path as she opened a filing cabinet drawer and removed a file.

She sat down and put it on the desk in front of her but she didn’t open it immediately. She was listening to her body. Her pulse had barely slowed since waking and opening the file wasn’t going to ease her anxiety, but she opened it anyway. She hadn’t looked at the contents since Jason had handed it to her; she hadn’t wanted to step into David’s dreams.

Her hands were surprisingly steady as she lifted out the holiday brochures and set them to one side. A handful of loose pages slipped out from between them and Jo followed their torn edges with a finger. She had little doubt that these had been torn from the holiday brochure she had offered up as evidence to DS Baxter that David had absconded. She had been right to think the missing pages had been part of his travel plans; it was just the timing she had got completely wrong. He had talked about plans that day, plans that would surprise her, but if these were part of them, then she prepared herself for disappointment as she turned her attention to the remaining papers in the file.

David had obviously spent hours poring over the details of his secret project. She could see handwritten scribbles here and there so she presumed it had still been a work in progress. Before building up the courage to look at the future plans, Jo scanned the list of completed tasks. It was hard to believe that their trip to Vietnam had been less than two years ago. Looking closely, Jo spotted an image embedded in the description. It was a copy of the stamp on his passport; that was why he’d taken it into work, not because he had been preparing to leave at a moment’s notice.

Feeling a little more encouraged, Jo skimmed over the next few lines which charted a weekend away in Venice, a winter break to Iceland and their Valentine’s trip to Paris, but it was the next entry that brought back uncomfortable memories; the trip to America David had been forced to cancel when Jo became pregnant; the point at which she had shredded his plans to connect the four corners of the earth. It surprised her to see that, rather than being deleted, the holiday had only been postponed.

While David was used to working with complex charts, it took Jo some time to work out how all the individual pieces of paper fitted together so she could see the full picture. Page by page, she began piecing together David’s master plan like a giant jigsaw puzzle, but this was no chocolate-box scene. The chart was two pages high and six pages wide with a list of tasks running down one side of the chart, a timeline across the top, and coloured bars in the middle to indicate what would happen when. There was only just enough room to fit everything on the desk and the last pages teetered dangerously over the edge. The reading lamp shone brightly over the centre of the chart while the outermost details of his plan remained dipped in shadows.

Squinting at the tiny writing, Jo looked first at the years along the top – all twenty-five of them, sliced into quarters – but her eyes were quickly drawn back to the list on the left-hand side. There were over thirty rows, one for each of the key events and milestones David had conjured up. She could see their Valentine’s trip to Paris and quickly found a corresponding bar under the first quarter of 2013. Now concentrating on their ill-fated trip to America, Jo’s eyes widened in disbelief as her finger trailed across the pages. David wasn’t intending on resurrecting his plans for this trip until 2034.

‘What the hell were you planning?’ Jo asked.

Her eyes darted from one section of the chart to the next as she began constructing the path she had thought would always remain enshrouded in shadow and conjecture, the one they would never be able to travel together. But thanks to David’s penchant for plans, they could still share it. She was about to laugh, but it caught in her throat when something drew her attention; it was only two letters, an abbreviation, but it wrenched from her an almighty sob.

A moment later, the study door creaked open. ‘Jo, are you all right?’

Jo swallowed back the tears as she twisted around in her chair to find Irene standing on the threshold. Her mother-in-law had stayed over for the night, sleeping on the inflatable bed in the nursery that she had joked she would never be able to get up from.

‘Sorry, did I wake you?’ Jo asked.

‘I heard you get up but I didn’t want to disturb you. But then I couldn’t bear to leave you crying in here on your own.’ Irene was struggling to hold back her own tears; they were never too far from the surface these days but Jo was relying on her mother-in-law to hold it together. Irene had surprised them both by how strong she could be. It was an inner strength that had previously remained hidden and unnecessary while surrounded by the men in her life. But it was there now and Jo was grateful to have someone who would show her how to be strong. She had been more than happy when Irene suggested staying; neither wanted to be on her own the night before the funeral.

‘I’m all right,’ Jo said, ‘but look what I’ve found.’ Jo placed her finger so gently on one of the pages it was almost a caress.

‘What is it?’ Irene asked, a little unsettled by the smile on her daughter-in-law’s face.

‘FB.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Remember I told you that David had called my bump FB, and how I thought I had worked out what it meant.’ Irene nodded, a look of pain crossing her face. ‘Well, I was wrong.’

Jo waited for her mother-in-law to read what she was pointing at, but Irene shook her head. ‘Sorry, Jo, I couldn’t read that even if I did have my glasses.’

‘FB is a reference David uses here. He couldn’t tell me because he didn’t want to share this plan with me right away. He was probably waiting until it was finished, or maybe he was making me suffer a little longer for pulling the rug from under him. Perhaps he realized I’d been proven right, that he was ready to be a dad, but he just wasn’t ready to admit it to me. There are some things I’ll never know, but at least I know what FB stands for now. It means First Born, Irene.’ Jo gave a soft chuckle before adding, ‘And there’s much more.
So
much more.’

Jo stood up and moved the chair out of the way so they could both stand in front of the desk and take in the full glory of David’s plans.