The Widow (7 page)

As we drive, she and Mick chat about ‘the office'. Seems her boss is a bit of a bully who shouts and swears at people.

‘He uses the C word so often, they call morning news conference the Vagina Monologue,' she tells me and they both start laughing. I don't know what a Vagina Monologue is but I don't let on.

It's like she and Mick live in another world. Kate is telling him about how the news editor – the Terry she was talking to on the phone – is very happy. Happy that she has got the widow, I suppose.

‘He'll be in and out of the editor's office all day, poor sod. Still, it'll stop him bitching at the other reporters. He's a funny bloke – get him in the pub and he's the life and soul. But in the office, he sits at his desk twelve hours a day, staring at his computer screen. He only looks up to give someone a bollocking. He's like one of the living dead.'

Mick laughs.

I lie down on the sleeping bag. It's a bit grubby but it doesn't smell too bad, so I doze and their voices fade into a background hum. When I wake up, we've arrived.

The hotel is big and expensive. The sort of place that has those enormous flowers that practically fill the lobby and real apples on the reception desk. I never know if those flowers are real, but the apples are. You can eat them if you want, the apples.

Kate's in charge.

‘Hi, you have three rooms for us under the name of Murray,' she informs the receptionist, who smiles and looks at her screen. ‘We only booked a couple of hours ago,' Kate says impatiently.

‘Here you are,' the receptionist says finally. Mick must be the Murray. He gives his credit card to the lady and she looks at me.

I suddenly realize what I must look like. A sight. My hair's all over the place after having the jacket over my head and sleeping in the van, and I was hardly dressed to go to the shops, let alone a posh hotel. I stand there, in my old trousers and T-shirt, looking at my feet in my cheap flip-flops while all the form-filling goes on. They put me down as Elizabeth Turner and I look at Kate.

She just smiles and whispers, ‘This way, no one will find you. They'll be looking for us.' I wonder who Elizabeth Turner really is and what she's doing this afternoon. I bet she's going through the racks at TK Maxx, not hiding from the press.

‘Any bags?' the woman asks and Kate says they're in the car and we'll get them out later. In the lift, I look at her and raise my eyebrows. She smiles back. We don't speak because there's a porter with us. Daft really because there's nothing to carry, but he wants to show us our rooms. And get a tip, I suppose. Room 142 is mine, next door to Kate in 144. The porter makes a big show of opening the door and ushering me in. I stand and look. It's lovely. Huge and bright with a chandelier. There's a sofa and a coffee table and lamps and more apples. They must have some sort of deal with Sainsbury's or somewhere to have so much fruit around.

‘Is this all right?' Kate asks.

‘Oh yes,' I say and sit down on the sofa to look at it all again. Our honeymoon hotel wasn't as posh as this. It was a family-run place in Spain. Still that was lovely, too. We had such a laugh. When we got there, I still had bits of confetti in my hair and the staff made a big fuss of us. There was a bottle of champagne waiting – Spanish stuff, which was a bit sickly – and the waitresses kept coming up and kissing us.

We spent our days lying by the pool, looking at each other. Loving each other. Such a long time ago.

Kate says there's a pool here. And a spa. I haven't got a swimsuit – or anything, really – but she asks my size and sets off to get me ‘some things'.

‘The paper will pay,' she says.

She books me a massage for while she's out.

‘To relax you,' she says. ‘It'll be lovely. They use essential oils – jasmine, lavender, that sort of thing – and you can go to sleep on the table. You need a bit of pampering, Jean.'

I'm not sure, but I go along with it. I haven't asked how long they're keeping me here. The subject hasn't come up and they seem to be treating it like a weekend break.

An hour later, I'm lying on the bed in a hotel dressing gown, practically floating I feel so relaxed. Glen would've said I smelled like a ‘tart's boudoir' but I love it. I smell expensive. Then Kate knocks and I'm back where I started. Back to reality.

She comes through the door with loads of carrier bags.

‘Here you go, Jean,' she says. ‘Try these on to see if they fit.'

Funny how she keeps using my name. Like a nurse. Or a conman.

She has chosen lovely things. A pale blue cashmere jumper I could never have afforded, a smart white shirt, a floaty skirt and a pair of tailored grey trousers, knickers, shoes, a swimsuit, luxury bubble bath, and a beautiful long nightie. I unpack it all while she watches.

‘I love that colour, don't you, Jean?' she says, picking up the jumper. ‘Duck-egg blue.'

She knows I love it too, but I try not to show too much.

‘Thank you,' I say. ‘I really don't need all this. I'm only here overnight. Perhaps you can take some of it back.'

She doesn't reply, just gathers up the empty bags and smiles.

It's well past lunchtime and they decide to have something to eat in Kate's room. All I want is a sandwich but Mick orders steak and a bottle of wine. I look afterwards and the wine was thirty-two pounds. You could get eight bottles of Chardonnay for that at the supermarket. He said it was ‘effing delicious'. He uses the F word a lot but Kate doesn't seem to notice. Her attention is all on me.

When the plates are put outside the door to be collected, Mick goes off to his room to sort out his cameras and Kate settles back in an armchair and starts chatting. Just normal chat, the sort of thing I would say to a client while I was shampooing her hair. But I know it can't last.

‘You must have been under a terrible strain since Glen's death,' she begins.

I nod and look strained. I can't tell her I haven't. The truth is that the relief has been wonderful.

‘How have you coped, Jean?'

‘It's been terrible,' I say with a catch in my voice and switch back to being Jeanie, the woman I used to be when I first got married.

Jeanie saved me. She bumbled on with her life, cooking tea, washing customers' hair, sweeping the floor and making the beds. She knew that Glen was the victim of a police plot. She stood by the man she married. The man she had chosen.

At first, Jeanie only reappeared when family or the police asked questions, but as more bad stuff began to leak under the door, Jeanie moved back into the house so Glen and I could carry on our life together.

‘It was a terrible shock,' I tell Kate. ‘He fell under the bus right there, in front of me. I didn't even have time to call out. He was gone. Then all these people came running up and kind of took over. I was too shocked to move and they took me to hospital to make sure I was all right. Everyone was so kind.'

Until they found out who he was.

You see, the police said Glen had taken Bella.

When they said her name, when they came to our house, all I could think of was her picture, that little face, those little round glasses and the plaster over one eye. She looked like a baby pirate. So sweet, I could've eaten her. No one had been able to talk about anything else for months – in the salon, in the shops, on the bus. Little Bella. She was playing in the garden outside her house in Southampton and someone just walked in and took her.

Course, I'd never have let a child of mine play outside on her own. She was only two and a half, for goodness' sake. Her mum should've taken better care of her. Bet she was sat watching Jeremy Kyle or some rubbish like that. It's always people like that that these things happen to, Glen says. Careless people.

And they said it was Glen who took her. And killed her. I couldn't breathe when they said it – the police, I mean. They were the first. Others said it later.

We stood there in our front hall with our mouths open. Well, I say we. Glen sort of went blank. His face was blank. He didn't look like Glen any more.

The police were quiet when they came. No banging down the door or anything, like on the telly. They knocked, rat-tat-tat-a-tat-a-tat. Glen had only just come in from cleaning the car. He opened the door and I put my head round the kitchen door to see who it was. It was two blokes, asking to come in. One looked like my geography teacher at school, Mr Harris. Same tweedy jacket.

‘Mr Glen Taylor?' he asked, all quiet and calm.

‘Yes,' Glen said, and asked if they were selling something. I couldn't hear properly at the beginning, but then they came in. They were policemen – Detective Inspector Bob Sparkes and his sergeant, they said.

‘Mr Taylor, I'd like to talk to you about the disappearance of Bella Elliott,' DI Sparkes said. And I opened my mouth to say something, to make the policeman stop saying these things, but I couldn't. And Glen's face went blank.

He never looked at me once the whole time. Never put his arm round me or touched my hand. He said later he was in shock. He and the policemen carried on talking, but I can't remember hearing what they were saying. I watched their mouths moving but I couldn't take it in. What had Glen got to do with Bella? He wouldn't harm a hair on a child's head. He loves children.

Then they left, Glen and the policemen. Glen told me later that he said goodbye and told me not to worry, it was just a stupid mix-up he'd sort out. But I don't remember that. Other policemen stayed at the house to ask me questions, to root around in our lives, but through it all, going round and round in my brain, I kept thinking about his face and how for a second I didn't know him.

He told me later someone had said he'd been making a delivery near where Bella disappeared, but that didn't mean anything. Just coincidence, he said. There must've been hundreds of people in the area that day.

He'd been nowhere near the scene of the crime – his delivery was miles away, he said. But the police were going through everyone, to check if they had seen anything.

He'd started as a delivery driver after he got laid off by the bank. They were looking for redundancies, he told people, and he fancied a change. He'd always dreamed of having the chance to start his own business, be his own boss.

The night I discovered the real reason was a Wednesday. Aerobics for me and late supper for us. He shouted at me about why I was later than usual, horrible tight words spat out, angry and dirty. Words he never used normally. Everything was wrong. He was crowding the kitchen with his accusations, his anger. His eyes were dead, as if he didn't know me. I thought he was going to hit me. I watched his fists clench and unclench at his sides, frozen at the cooker, spatula in my hand.

My kitchen, my rules, we used to joke. But not that Wednesday. Wednesday's child is full of woe.

The row ended with a slammed door as he marched off to bed – to sleep in the spare room on the sofa bed, cut off from me. I remember standing at the foot of the stairs, numb. What was this about? What had happened? I didn't want to think about what it meant for us.

‘Stop it,' I told myself. ‘It'll be all right. He must've had a bad day. Let him sleep it off.'

I started tidying, picking up his scarf and jacket from where he'd hung them on the bannister and putting them on the coat hooks by the door. I felt something stiff in one pocket, a letter. A white envelope with a see-through panel, with his name and our address showing. From the bank. The words were official and as stiff as the envelope: ‘inquiry … unprofessional behaviour … inappropriate … termination, forthwith'. I was lost in the formal language but I knew this meant disgrace. The end of our dreams. Our future. Clutching the letter in my hand, I ran up the stairs. I marched into the spare room and flicked on the light. He must've heard me coming but pretended to be asleep until I heard myself screech, ‘What is this about?'

He looked at me like I was nothing. ‘I've been fired,' he said and rolled back over to pretend to sleep.

The next morning, Glen came into our bedroom with a cup of tea in my favourite cup. He looked like he'd hardly slept and said he was sorry. He sat down on the bed and said he was under a lot of pressure and it was all a misunderstanding at work and that he'd never got on with the boss. He said he'd been set up and blamed for something. Some mistake, he said. He'd done nothing wrong. His boss was jealous. Glen said he had big plans for his future, but that didn't matter if I wasn't beside him.

‘You are the centre of my world, Jeanie,' he said and held me close, and I hugged him back and let go of my fear.

Mike, a friend he said he met on the internet, told him about the driving job – ‘just while I work out what business I want to get into it, Jeanie,' he said. It was cash in hand at first and then they took him on permanently. He stopped talking about being his own boss.

He had to wear a uniform, quite smart: pale-blue shirt with the company logo on the pocket and navy trousers. Glen didn't like wearing a uniform – ‘It's demeaning, Jeanie, like being back at school' – but he got used to it and seemed happy enough. He'd go out in the morning and wave as he drove off to pick up the van. Off on his travels, he'd say.

I only went with him once. A special job for the boss on a Sunday just before Christmas one year. Must've been the Christmas before he was arrested. It was only down to Canterbury and I fancied a run out. We sat in total silence on the way down. I had a root through his glove box. Just stuff. Some sweets. I helped myself and offered one to Glen to cheer him up. He didn't want it and told me to put them back.

The van was lovely and clean. Spotless. I never normally saw it. It was kept at the depot and he took his car to pick it up in the morning. ‘Nice van,' I said, but he just grunted.

‘What's in the back?'