The Loving Husband

by Christobel Kent

  ‘So how did you know? About me.’

  ‘We didn’t know about that incident.’ His implication was clear – there had been others. Someone had told him about others.

  ‘Office party, was it?’ said Carswell, his head bobbing up and she saw it again, that gleam on him, an instinct for cruelty. ‘We didn’t know nothing about that.’ Impish, he ducked back to his notebook.

  They hadn’t known at all. ‘So what…’ She faltered. ‘What did you mean, then? When you asked me if I’d been … seeing someone else?’

  ‘Since you got here.’ Gerard’s voice was light. ‘We were talking about you seeing someone since you got here. Meeting someone for coffee, little chats on park benches. Innocent, maybe?’

  ‘I’m not having an affair,’ she said. ‘Are you talking about friends? What have friends got to do with this?’ She sat tight, shoving her hands under her thighs to conceal the tremble. ‘If he was gay,’ she said. They looked back at her, their faces bland and helpful, and she went on. ‘Are you saying he might have picked someone up in the pub? Someone—’

  ‘Someone violent?’ offered Gerard helpfully. ‘The “management”’ – he spoke with heavy irony – ‘say not. Not that night, anyway.’

  She made herself persist. ‘But sometimes?’ Did it fit with a man coming into her room, equipped with a condom? She had to tell them: Confess, confess. But she’d done nothing wrong and she couldn’t, anyway. She’d stripped the bed, she’d destroyed the evidence.

  At that moment she felt the weird insistent tingle that meant Ben was due a feed. She pulled her jacket round herself. ‘My bedroom, you dusted for prints in there, too, didn’t you?’

  ‘We did,’ said Gerard, ‘I was going to get to that, yes.’ Smiling. ‘Not much, nothing on the light switch—’

  ‘He didn’t turn the light on,’ said Fran quickly.

  He turned to examine her and nodded slowly, ‘So you’re coming round,’ he said lightly, ‘to thinking you weren’t asleep, you weren’t dreaming, then?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, submissive although his implication was clear. ‘Yes.’ Was this how coerced confessions happened? She felt like she’d been here before, as though her life with Nathan had all been leading to this point.

  Gerard was talking. ‘There were some small prints that would be your daughter’s, though we’re not keen on fingerprinting her, for obvious reasons.’ Perhaps he wanted to be thanked for that. Fran said nothing. ‘Plenty of your husband’s prints,’ he went on, ‘as we’d expect. All over the place, wardrobe, drawers, lamp.’ She thought of Nathan’s hands, inquisitive, Nathan holding open her wardrobe doors and looking at the dress she’d never worn.

  Doug Gerard’s smile was mild, enquiring. ‘Though the bedside table, now. Your side, I mean. The little drawer there?’

  She sat up, forward. ‘My side?’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Gerard encouragingly. ‘Only a partial, which is frustrating. And doesn’t match anything we’ve got in the database, as far as we can tell, though with a partial it’s not straightforward … Oh,’ he leaned forward, ‘and there was a Valentine’s card in that drawer,’ and she gasped, she couldn’t help herself. ‘There’s traces on that, but the surface isn’t good for a print, that heavy paper, the best we could do maybe is harvest a bit of DNA. I was meaning to ask though, had you bought that for your husband? It was in your drawer, after all.’

  ‘No, I, no,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I thought it was from Nathan, I found it and I thought…’ She stopped.

  And Gerard looked at Carswell, conspiratorial, then back at her. ‘Sorry,’ he said blandly, ‘just wanted to clear that one up. Funny, is all. That you had it in your bedside drawer.’ He smiled.

  He thought she was keeping it there, a message from her lover, the man who’d been in her bed. And as her next thought arrived, I do need a solicitor, she saw Gerard’s broad, thick-veined hand, come out slowly, unerringly to pick up her phone from the table between them.

  He glanced up at the camera’s eye, inviting its complicity, then back at her. ‘Mind if I have a look?’

  I mind. I mind. She felt her heart pounding. She thought of lie detector tests. She said nothing.

  She’d walked into the kitchen after a long sunny afternoon in the town with Ben, and Nathan had been there at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, Emme playing out in the field. He’d sat there watching as she unpacked the shopping, and there her phone had been. Sitting on top of her cluttered handbag on the table, among the bags spilling sliced bread and bananas.

  He hadn’t even asked, as she turned from the cupboard she just saw him lean across the table and pick it out of the bag.

  Fran had stopped where she was, a multipack of tinned tomatoes in her arms, and stared. He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Mine’s out of battery,’ he said.

  Nathan could have come with her to Oakenham that day, he wasn’t in the office but he said instead, ‘I’ll pick Emme up. You go in, take the car, make a day of it.’

  Consciously or unconsciously she took the same route each time since that first time, when she’d sat by the bridge. Since she’d looked up and shaded her eyes to see who it was standing there. She whispered down to Ben in the buggy, willing him to fall asleep. They turned a wide bend on the towpath and the bench was there, waiting in the sunshine.

  She’d stopped in the lay-by on the edge of the town, coming home, and taken out her phone, typed it quickly, two or three words, and pressed send. It didn’t mean anything, she told herself, though her whole body hummed with the sensation. It was just the sunshine and the unexpected freedom, she told herself. She looked down at the screen and the words on it, it’s innocent, she told herself, but something whispered back to her, what would Nathan say?

  Delete. She deleted.

  ‘Just got to look this thing up quickly,’ said Nathan at the kitchen table, frowning down at the tiny screen. ‘Can’t be bothered to wait for the computer to start up again,’ and she hovered. ‘You don’t mind?’ When he said that, she had to turn away so he couldn’t see her face.

  Why would she mind? Old emails, photographs, messages, nothing she wouldn’t let him see. What’s mine is yours. ‘Sure,’ she said and she made herself go on with the unpacking. When she did come back to the table, sat down and reached for her tea she glanced, just quickly, and saw that he wasn’t on the internet at all, he was looking at her photographs. Nathan could see that she was looking, though, because he held the screen up to show her: a seagull she’d seen flying into the wind over the river that morning. He had smiled, and handed it back to her.

  Walking past the chair where his jacket hung an hour or so later, though, Fran had felt the weight of his mobile bump against her and she had stopped. She had listened until she heard his voice and then she had gone to the door to make sure where he was, outside, in the field, in the lee of the barn, calling for Emme, before going back and removing the phone. It came to life in her hand and she saw that it had eighty per cent charge. She put it back in his pocket.

  After that, if not every afternoon before Nathan got home from work then regularly, at least, she got into the habit of sifting through her phone, examining its history and its settings. She saw that there was a setting called privacy, though she didn’t trust it. She began to delete things, just as a matter of course.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Crossing the quiet residential street where she’d found the solicitor’s office, a plain terraced house with vinyl windows and double-glazing just like the others except for the discreet sign on the door, Fran thought if anyone lifted a net curtain they’d be able to tell what had happened just by the way she walked back to the car.

  The will? Karen had said on the phone, then there’d been a lull as her hand went over the receiver. Sure, take all the time you need. A wary note in her voice. We’ll go for a walk after football maybe. Get them some chips.

  Jerky, stiff-legged, with Ben bouncing startled on one hip, Fran hardly knew what to do
with the information the solicitor had given her. He was dead, after all, how could you be angry with a dead man? Perhaps that was what he’d relied on. She was more than angry: she was on the brink of murderous rage.

  She climbed into the car.

  The solicitor had agreed to see her, even though it was a Saturday: Fran should have guessed, maybe, from that, from the guilty haste in her voice. The police, she said, had already called.

  A woman of about sixty in a neat pale suit, she might have been someone’s aunt at a wedding. Her hair looked as though it had once been red but now it just looked dusty.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she had said, spreading her hands, and she had, genuinely, seemed sorry. In fact she had looked almost scared. The will had been made not long after Ben had been born; that made sense, Fran supposed.

  ‘Why wouldn’t he have told me he was making a will?’

  The woman pretended to study the few pages in front of her. The will had been drawn up perhaps a week after Fran had gone in to Oakenham in the car with Ben, he’d have been six weeks old, perhaps. A week after Nathan had plucked her phone right out of her bag and started to look through it. As if he knew.

  When DS Gerard had done the same thing, she’d been almost primed, she knew this situation. As with Nathan, she’d sat tight. Quiet as a mouse, give nothing away. She felt as though she had no more than a splinter of leverage left, and if she didn’t take care she’d lose that.

  ‘Sorry,’ Gerard had said to her as he set the phone back in front of her in the room at the police station, ‘just … you know. Covering all the bases.’ And, frowning, ‘You don’t keep it locked?’ She just shook her head. She should have told him, no. There was no right way to behave, once you were a suspect.

  She’d left the phone where Gerard had set it back down on the table between them and had waited one beat then another, before reaching for her bag and pulling out the photograph, holding it so they couldn’t see it. She noticed that they both changed as she did that, they went still.

  ‘A couple of things,’ Fran said to the policemen, and she felt a little pulse of an almost forgotten sensation: she could make them listen, now.

  ‘First,’ and she carefully kept the photograph away from them, against her chest, ‘what about John Martin? The man who sold us the house. The man whose wife disappeared only because … Well, the man who told me called her a pikey,’ and she paused then, glancing up at the camera. ‘Not my word, by the way. I don’t even know what you mean by that word. Itinerant, traveller, whatever.’ Carswell’s eyes were wide, and she went on. ‘Anyway, no one asked why she’d gone off in the middle of the night and left her dog behind.’ She took a breath. They eyed her, Carswell almost panting like a dog himself.

  ‘John Martin,’ said Gerard, eyeing her levelly. ‘Yes, we’ve heard that story, as a matter of fact. The wife who tried to get money out of him, a good twenty years younger than him, tried and failed, I know who John Martin is. Sorry, what is your theory?’

  Had Dearborn told them? ‘I don’t have a theory,’ she said. ‘That’s your job. But he told me he was moving to the seaside, and he hasn’t gone anywhere.’

  Gerard nodded. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m sure we can find him. And his wife, for that matter.’ He turned his head just a little, to include Carswell. ‘I think you’d know if John Martin climbed into bed with you, don’t you Ed? You could always smell him a mile off, the chickens on him.’

  Suddenly Fran felt so sick she almost started to her feet. With an effort she stayed put.

  ‘And what’s that you’ve got there?’ said Gerard, leaning forward, his voice gentle again as if he’d never said it, the crude thing.

  Hours earlier, Emme had stared down at it when Fran had showed it to her in their warm kitchen, Karen at the sink drying up for all the world as if she was part of the family. ‘Can I have it?’ she asked, lifting her face up to look from the photograph to her mother. ‘It’s my daddy.’ Her lower lip held firm. Fran saw the effort it took.

  ‘I need to show it to someone else first,’ Fran had said carefully at the kitchen table and then Emme had looked back down, examining the faces. ‘That’s Daddy, and that’s Rob,’ she said. And she leaned closer, her finger went out and traced the man at the centre. ‘And that’s the bad man,’ she said, and her voice went high, higher.

  ‘Emme…’ she’d begun, catching Karen watching from the sink, but Emme had drawn herself up, stiffly, her hair in its tight ponytail swinging, her little white collar neat.

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy,’ she said, still holding on to the picture. ‘Harry’s waiting. It’s our game, he’s going to be angry if I’m late.’ But she looked at the photograph again, frowning.

  ‘What is it, Emme? What can you see?’

  Emme had frowned and blinked, then shaken her head so her ponytail swung. Her lip pulled back in, she had pushed the photograph back across the table at Fran, glancing sideways up at Karen. ‘Nothing, Mummy. Nothing. I can’t see anything. Except I wondered, if they’re all there, I wondered who was taking the picture. That’s all.’ Her grey eyes lingered on it, she watched as, carefully, Fran slid it into her bag. My daddy.

  Bastard. And now she sat behind the solicitor’s stupid leather-topped desk, that looked so out of place in the cramped, bay-windowed front room stacked with box files in an ordinary semi and called him that, out loud. Bastard.

  ‘The fact is,’ said the solicitor, ‘a will is a private matter, very often, even for parents, even for happily married couples.’ She looked nervous. ‘Of course it’s advisable to be open, to work these things out together, to avoid exactly this kind of … kind of…’

  ‘Injustice?’ said Fran, and she felt herself begin to shake. ‘I don’t want his money. I never wanted his money.’

  You should never, was the thought that had sprung into her head, the same thought that came back to her now as the solicitor spoke, you should never have given up work. Never. That’s why you’re here in this room listening to this shit. She looked back and saw, as though down a long lens, those weeks and months and years when inch by inch she’d let it go: Jo asking her to fly to Italy and interview a pasta producer; Carine calling up in excitement and saying, there’s a spot on health and beauty, you could do it part time. Nathan’s face when she said it. Pasta. Lipsticks. Not sneering exactly, but patiently uncomprehending. And what about train fares? Childcare?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the solicitor again. ‘We do like to persuade clients to amplify their intentions in an addendum to the will, if there’s … a situation like this. Setting out their reasons.’

  ‘What reason,’ Fran had said, very, very calmly, because if she lost it now, with Ben on her knee and a representative of the legal system eyeing her across the desk, she thought it quite possible that she would never again have control, in any area of her life, ‘what reason could he have had? I mean…’ She drew breath in a big gulp. ‘I don’t want his money. I don’t want his fucking money, I was the one gave up my job for the children, I could have fought, I could have gone back…’ The woman was shaking her head, a warning look. ‘But Emme? Emme?’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ said the woman with her faded sandy hair. ‘It’s…’ She spread her hands again. ‘I’ve given up wondering what goes on in people’s heads, where wills are concerned. I’m just a solicitor. You might have a case for challenging it, obviously I am the executor, I can’t possibly … but…’ She shuffled the papers. ‘As I say, there’s provision for you and your daughter while the children are dependent, and the house is paid off in the event of his death.’

  ‘But then it all goes to Ben.’ She and the solicitor looked at Ben then, in the crook of her arm. His dark eyes were on her, not leaving her face. She made herself smile down at him, he looked back, uncertain. ‘So he left nothing to me, nothing to Emme.’ The woman shifted in her seat and nodded.

  It came out of Fran in a rush, she had no wish to stop it. ‘The bastard,’ she said. ‘The bastard.’
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  Sitting behind the wheel of her car Fran listened to the engine. She couldn’t drive with all this inside her, she had to wait, she had to let it percolate. She squeezed her eyes shut and thought of Nathan’s face, open, smiling, choosing her. You’re the one. It had all seemed so right: baby, marriage. She had seen what she was feeling mirrored in him. The loving husband.

  But he never loved us, she thought. He was mirroring, all right, he was watching to see what I wanted to see, it was fake. As flat and empty as glass. As she understood that she knew exactly why he’d done it: to show them he felt nothing. To show them he could move and manipulate them, set them against each other. Ben might get the money – and there was plenty of it, according to the solicitor, significantly more than Fran would have expected, there were several accounts, all in the name of Alan Nathan Hall – but no one who properly loved a child could set him against his mother and sister. Ben – and she turned back to check on him, he was frowning down at his own fingers – was as much of a pawn as she and Emme were. Nathan didn’t feel anything for them, and he wanted them to know that. They had been his to use, and now he was dead he was still using them.

  It meant something. She’d find out what. She engaged the gears and pulled out, smoothly, into the quiet suburban street.

  ‘I want Ben back,’ she said to Gerard, still holding on to the photograph. ‘I’d like Ali in here, too.’

  For the five minutes it took Carswell to track them down in the police station and bring them in to the room, Gerard had sat there in silence, perfectly still. It seemed to Fran a strategy designed to show her who was boss, and to insult her. She used his stillness to look at him, accumulating evidence: he wore aftershave; he ironed his own shirt. Either he wasn’t interested in food, or he went to the gym, or both. He wasn’t married, he didn’t have a girlfriend, he didn’t like women.

  She couldn’t prove any of it, but that didn’t make it inaccurate.