The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  And then her arms had been around Fran and holding on tight with Ben pressed between them, not caring where they were, who might be staring.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Fran into Jo’s hair, smelling the cigarette smoke and perfume mixed then pulling back, gently detaching herself. ‘I’ve got to go back.’

  ‘No, No, you don’t, you—’

  ‘If I don’t go back,’ said Fran, and it wasn’t until the words were out that she knew they were true, ‘if I don’t go back they won’t get him. If I don’t go back he’ll always be out there.’ Jo frowned furiously and Fran stepped closer. ‘You’re still here. I know I’ve got you if I need you. That’s a lot. That’s a lot.’

  Jo had stood there, frowning at the words, and Fran knew she was trying not to show what she was feeling. ‘I should have told the police,’ she said. ‘I was just so … gobsmacked, it went out of my head, I mean, murder? Murder? Tell them, I’ll talk to them again, tell that policewoman you said was on the case.’ Ali Compton: Fran had opened her mouth to tell Jo about the other two, Gerard and Carswell, but hadn’t even been able to get started on that.

  Jo was still talking. ‘Because if it’s what … if it’s what I thought, then don’t you see … it’s over. It’s done. It wasn’t about you, it was about Nathan.’

  What Jo had seen.

  They were off the motorway now, the light had gone from the sky and the road ahead was empty. Their headlights illuminated telegraph poles, one after the other, and the frosted grass on the verge. Fran risked a glance back over her shoulder and there they were, asleep. ‘Shh,’ she found herself whispering, because this was it, all very well saying to Jo, it’s OK, we’ll be OK. This was real. They were back.

  In the square with the traffic roaring round them and Emme wrapped around her and her heart still pounding with the panic, Jo had told her.

  ‘I saw him,’ she said and in unison they turned to walk back. ‘I saw Nathan one night when you’d told me he was away on some conference or other. I saw him, late at night.’

  ‘Where?’ They stopped, at the gate out of the square. Emme leaned for a stick and began to run it along the railings: two steps then turning to make sure they were still there, another two steps on and another look back.

  ‘Tell me again. Exactly what the police said about … how they found him.’

  Haltingly, her voice low so Emme wouldn’t hear, Fran told her. When she got to the bit about territory and men peeing outside, Jo nodded, briskly, to stop her. ‘His clothing was disturbed.’ She frowned down at her hands. She let out an angry breath. ‘It was a part of the Heath that’s … well known, let’s say. I was coming back from a party.’

  ‘Well known?’ said Fran slowly. Jo was still staring down, jaw clenched.

  ‘The traffic – it’s slow there, a bit where you have to give way, plus roadworks, there was a long queue, and we were hardly moving, you’d think they’d sort it out but maybe they like it that way. The men … like an audience.’

  She looked up again, into Fran’s face. ‘You know what dogging is, right? Not just gay guys, there’s hetero versions too but this particular location, it’s pretty much exclusively a gay guys’ place, and I just turned my head, I was mostly looking straight ahead because I was tired, and it’s not my thing, voyeurism, but I guess I was curious, or something caught my eye. Anyway.’

  ‘You saw Nathan,’ said Fran, and in the space at the back of her brain where things, all sorts of things these last days, weeks, months, had been rubbing painfully against each other, suddenly, smoothly they slotted into place, as neat as a puzzle cube. ‘You’re telling me Nathan was gay.’

  ‘The funny thing,’ said Jo in a monotone, as if she was talking to herself, ‘was he wasn’t trying to hide from anyone. From me. Just as I turned my head he turned his and I swear he looked straight at me and he didn’t look frightened, he didn’t turn away or panic, he just looked right back at me…’ Her voice dropped, faltered.

  ‘Nathan was gay,’ Fran repeated and belatedly she heard it in Jo’s voice. Nathan had looked at her, and she’d been frightened.

  ‘He wasn’t … they weren’t actually…’ Fierce Jo, fearless Jo, unable to get the words out.

  ‘They weren’t having sex,’ said Fran, testing the words to see if they hurt: they didn’t. Not much. ‘But he was gay. It … well. It explains … some things.’

  Does it? Does it? Yes and no.

  ‘Don’t you think…’ Jo hesitated. ‘The squat they lived in all together. Him going back there where he grew up looking for old friends—’

  But Fran stepped back, calling to Emme at the railings, she moved so sharply Ben was jolted, his face screwed up briefly, then smoothed again as she pressed him against her. Below her she could see Jo’s face beginning to close. She thinks I’m in denial, she thought, there’s no point …

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You could be right, you could well be right, it explains a lot of things, how he was with me, yes, yes…’ Now she was overdoing it, though she registered bewilderment in Jo’s eyes. ‘It explains a lot of things.’

  On the radio they were saying snow had fallen in the Highlands, there had been power cuts. Two bodies found in a snowdrift under a bridge, a crash on black ice. Gritting lorries.

  It explained a lot of things, but it didn’t explain everything. Back in the lobby of the magazine’s building and Ken behind his desk keeping his head down while they whispered, Emme staring up in silence, Jo had looked worn out, her winter skin pale and powdery above the sharp collar.

  ‘I know I should have told you,’ she said, defeated. ‘I didn’t know … it wasn’t concrete, you know? I didn’t want to sound like one of those women, goes around reporting every little thing, trying to break things up because she wants her best friend back.

  ‘And then you were pregnant.’ Jo turned to look out through the revolving doors to the grey world, a taxi pulling up. ‘I could see how happy you were.’

  Before she drifted off in the back seat, Emme had said, piping, ‘Who was that lady, Mummy?’

  ‘My best friend,’ said Fran, even if the words weren’t quite what Emme would understand by them, something a bit more worn and battered.

  They were on the long straight road that ended at Cold Fen, banked up on one side against the watercourse. They were nearly home, the darkness thick around them. A lay-by was signposted and Fran pulled over into the lee of the dyke and turned off the ignition.

  Jo thought Nathan had been gay. Not impossible, not a crime either, nor the end of the world. True, it had filled her with shame that was almost a kind of despair to begin with, but she had had years, by now, to get used to the fact that Nathan wasn’t really hers. That look, his face turning blank, opaque, that would make her desperate. To please him. To get him back.

  ‘You were how old?’ she’d said, the first time he’d told her about the squat. ‘Seventeen? And your parents didn’t come and bring you home?’

  She’d almost seen his face smoothing, deflecting as he returned to reading the newspaper at the kitchen table in London, with the little stack of property details by his hand, the top one the fine three-hundred-year-old house with its double front oblique to the road, looking out towards the line of poplars. Long windows with panelled shutters, the steep red pitch of the roof, the pretty neglected yard, a handsome house built for a prosperous farmer, sitting above a drained fen and still there as the landscape emptied around it. Too good to be true.

  ‘Nearly eighteen,’ Nathan had murmured, as if losing interest. ‘That many years ago it was common to leave home at eighteen. University of life – and I was only a couple of miles away, they knew where we were.’ And he had peered down at the newspaper and Fran’s idea of what it had been like that distant summer had been settled: two long warm months bleached to sepia, sunburned boys sleeping on dusty floors, swimming in the flooded quarry.

  The photograph wouldn’t have told her a different story either, not really, except for what she now knew, ex
cept when she thought about where they were now, those three boys. Nathan cold in the ditch with his head down and his blood, his shirt heavy with it. Rob, gaunt and frightened, staring at the photograph on the top of the pile in her arms. It came to her now that he’d looked at it as if it would bite him. And Bez, drugged out somewhere, lying in piss-soaked clothes in a children’s playground.

  The engine ticked and cooled, Emme stirred and grumbled behind her and was asleep again. She picked up the mobile and dialled Jo’s number. It only rang twice before Jo picked up, breathless. ‘Are you OK? Look, I’m sorry I … I shouldn’t…’

  ‘I’m nearly home.’ Fran leaned back in the car’s dark interior. She could hear a tap running, the clatter of pans. ‘Are you eating?’ she said, in sudden retreat. ‘Are you cooking? I can call another time…’

  ‘No,’ said Jo firmly, and there was a muffled sound, then she was back, and a door closed. ‘It … we’re not eating for a bit anyway.’ And she sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I shouldn’t have just blurted it out like that. I should have said something years ago or not at all.’

  ‘No,’ said Fran, staying level and calm. ‘I’m glad you told me. You could even be right.’ Jo was silent: what happens, Fran wondered, when I tell her? If. I was … it was … there was a man in my bed. She cleared her throat, but it wouldn’t come out. ‘It’s just that it seems … too easy. My husband doesn’t fancy me, so he must be gay?’

  There was a silence, that lasted long enough for her to hear something outside, a steady wind, a soft pattering in trees somewhere far off.

  ‘So why did he marry me? This isn’t the nineteen fifties. We know why I did it, I wanted the baby, I assumed if he wanted it too marriage was what came next. Stupid maybe, lazy maybe, cowardly, but why him? Why did he come after me and marry me, why did we have two kids?’ Jo didn’t say anything, so she thrashed on. ‘Why did he want to move back out to the sticks with me, if he had an awful time here, if it was what fucked him up?’

  Her voice dropped, almost inaudible. ‘Do you think Nathan knew, Jo? Did you tell him, about that guy? The one-night … the—’

  ‘No,’ hissed Jo, ‘of course I didn’t tell him, what do you take me for?’

  ‘Did you know his name?’ whispered Fran. ‘The … the guy. His name, where he works, that stuff.’ She felt a flush up her neck, and she gabbled, ‘But when this happened. Do you know what I thought? Just for a second. He’s come after me. The guy.’

  ‘That loser?’ Jo scoffed. ‘No. He…’

  The hair rose on Fran’s scalp, her skin crawled with shame, thinking of the long staircase and the man’s back, she dreaded being even told his name and tried to escape, to forestall. ‘No, don’t, I don’t want to know anything. Don’t tell me his name.’

  ‘He’s been working on the other side of the world for almost a year,’ said Jo. The relief that flooded Fran’s system was only momentary, because Jo was pushing still. ‘So you never found out why, what it was all about? Why Nathan was so keen on going back to the sticks? Excited, you said.’

  ‘No,’ Fran whispered. ‘I mean … it didn’t come to anything, no big jobs materialised, it turns out his office was…’ and she trailed off under a sudden sense of shame. ‘Not much more than a … a shed.’ A box on a light industrial estate.

  Where had that excitement come from? What had it been about? What had he come back here for?

  There was a silence, then Jo cleared her throat. ‘I saw your press conference,’ she said, hesitant. ‘It’s up on some crime website.’

  ‘It is?’ Fran felt cold.

  And then, on cue, Jo said, ‘What did happen that night, Fran? Because you’re still not telling me it all, are you?’ Beyond the windscreen in the dark something whirled and hung as fine as dust, it barely speckled the glass. ‘You looked so frightened.’

  ‘Oh, Jo,’ she said. ‘I wish … I wish … I wish you were here.’ And quickly, before she lost it, ‘I’ll call you.’ And she hung up.

  When she looked down at the screen, she saw it as if from high overhead, a tiny blue rectangle of light in all the wide flat darkness. Three messages, it said. Missed call. Doug Gerard.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  He was there when she hurried back out to lock the car, standing beside a battered Range Rover with no glass in the back windscreen, his cap in his hands. She felt her heart race until she recognised him. Emme cleaning her teeth upstairs, half asleep. Ben in his car seat on her bed.

  There had been a terse answerphone message from Doug Gerard. ‘You haven’t been answering your phone. You’ll be…’ and there was a heavy pause. ‘You’ll be glad to hear we’ve had an excellent response to the press conference. We’d like a word. It might be best…’ Another pause, then, with finality, ‘If you were to come back into the station tomorrow morning at nine thirty.’

  It had been the cap in his hands that had identified Fred Dearborn. ‘What is it?’ Fran said, weary to the point of despair, adrenalin beginning to battle it. They were alone inside. The back door unlocked.

  ‘The wife sent me,’ he said, and from his reluctance she believed him. ‘Make sure you was all right.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ said Fran dully. She pressed the locking device on her key and the car’s lights pulsed, the locks setting with a clunk. ‘I don’t need casseroles, Mr Dearborn. It’s as much as I can do to get a bit of toast down, and the kids … I mean, thank you.’

  ‘Don’t matter,’ the farmer said, gruff. ‘I never meant to…’ and he stepped back from her, reaching down for his car door.

  Fran put a hand to her forehead – it wasn’t as if she had help to spare at the moment, never mind friends.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s very kind of your wife. Look … the baby’s … I can’t…’ She gave up. ‘Why don’t you come in a minute?’ She heard his footsteps behind her in the gravel. Mental, she thought, what made her think she had any instinct for who was safe? No wonder they all thought she was crazy, or guilty. Fuck the lot of them. He ducked his head to get under the lintel.

  ‘Milk two sugars,’ Dearborn said obediently when she asked and she spooned it in, stirred, handing it to him then went to the foot of the stairs to listen, but there was no sound. She came back and folded her arms across her body, watching him peer at the tea. He had bushy greying eyebrows that moved as he sipped, gingerly.

  ‘Did you ever find anywhere for your pigs?’ she asked, abrupt, and he raised his big head in surprise.

  ‘Matter of fact I did,’ he said. ‘Twenty-acre field other side of Oakenham. Funny enough it’s old Martin’s, could’ve knocked me down with a feather when he come up to me—’

  ‘John Martin? The … the man who lived here?’ She shook her head stubbornly. ‘No,’ she said. ‘He’s gone. He said he was going to the seaside.’ Agitated, she crossed to the sink, sweeping the dirty breakfast things into it, turning on the tap. Suddenly the room looked a shambles, she saw spilled milk, a ring where a mug had stood. She picked up a cloth.

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ said Dearborn watching her ruminatively. ‘I see him at an agricultural auction up to Chatteris a month ago, he were just looking, he said, but it en’t the seaside, is it? Not Chatteris.’ He shook his head slowly, wondering. ‘Funny one and no mistake. Twenty year he’s refused to talk to me. Must have been getting shot of this place. Two year on the market and no one wanted it, not even his wife, she upped and gone, packed her bags one night and he turned into a whassit, recluse.’ He pronounced the word as if it was foreign. ‘Newspaper up at the windows. Estate agents had to send someone in to clean the place up in the end, make it look normal. Not that it was much better when she was around. Not that kind of female, she weren’t.’ And he came to a halt, as if surprised at the length of his own speech.

  ‘Where did she go?’ Fran asked, the cloth in her hands, because it had snagged somewhere, packed her bags one night. The missing wife. ‘Ahh, I dunno,’ said Dearborn, setting down his cup, not unki
nd. ‘Back to the pikeys, no doubt, back where she come from, when she found out there weren’t no money in it.’ He spoke without animus. ‘She did talk about the seaside to my missus, once, Yarmouth it was. Mebbe he was planning on going after her.’ He laughed, puzzled.

  ‘No one ever saw her again?’ Fran heard herself, quick and breathless, and slowly he shook his head again.

  ‘Just gone,’ he said. ‘But…’ He frowned. ‘You don’t want to … she weren’t your sort. You know where he found her? Internet. Went into the library and used them computers, chatroom, next thing you know she’s getting out an Oakenham taxi in high-heeled shoes, three suitcases in the back.’

  He cleared his throat. ‘I better be off,’ he said, rubbing at a watch on his wrist: it felt like two in the morning but she could see that it wasn’t much after nine. ‘Leave you to it, with them kids. Mine’s grown now but … well. Dunno how she’d’a managed on ’er own, need eyes in the back of yer head, kiddies.’

  ‘Are you saying … she was like a mail-order sort of…’ It caught in her throat.

  ‘One word for it,’ he said shortly, uneasy. His hand was on the door, his head already lowered for the cap. ‘They was married, I believe. But it weren’t for love, not on her side.’

  ‘I would like a dog,’ she said abruptly and he stopped, turning in surprise.

  ‘Right then,’ he said, ‘I’ll look out for one. Mebbe a collie? Bit lively.’ His face clouded. ‘She had a collie cross,’ he said.

  ‘She?’

  ‘Soft on that dog, Martin’s woman. Jilly-Ann.’ Finally retrieving her name. ‘Never took it with ’er, though. Tret it like it were her very own baby but never took it when she went.’ And he was ducking through the door. ‘Couldn’t make sense of that. He had it put down.’ He tipped his hat. ‘I’ll let you know. Get a puppy for you. Golden retriever’s a gentle dog.’

  Upstairs Emme lay asleep and fully clothed on the bed. By the time Fran had undressed her and settled her back under the covers she could hear Ben stirring in the car seat, protesting against confinement and a nappy that had soaked through to the seat’s lining. She changed him and lay beside him on her bed, because she didn’t want to be alone.