The Loving Husband by Christobel Kent Read Free Book Online Page A

would he say? Would he look at her and ask, so gently, so reasonably, Why would you think that? As if she was crazy. As if she was suspect. In her head she saw something that was growing, pushing its way through a rotten window frame. Because he was still here. Because I saw him. Because …
    And if she did what the policeman wanted, if she left? If she gathered the children and went to hide in some safe house, some miserable bedsit? He’d still be out there, and instead the police would be in this house, with this man, this Doug Gerard opening her cupboards. And then she was on her feet, still shaking her head, stubborn.
    ‘We’re not leaving here. This is our home.’
    Gerard looked at her a long moment, severe. Carswell had moved around from behind her and was next to him now.
    ‘All right,’ Gerard said carefully, and he was standing, zipping his fleece. ‘So why don’t you show me where you think you saw this man?’
    And there was something in the way Gerard was looking at her that brought a sweat out under her arms, as if he knew what kind of woman she was, what she’d done, what had brought them here. As if he already knew the exact chain of events and he was just waiting to see if she’d tell him.

Chapter Six
    We love it here.
    That had been a lie, too.

    On the drive up, she had felt a sinking as she registered the landscape flattening, emptying and London was left behind. They had passed the grey spires and towers of Cambridge, a smudge on the horizon, then a famous cathedral rising like an island, some old flint churches hiding among trees and, increasingly, nothing. The road had dwindled to an arrow-straight single carriageway with fields butting dead-level up against it: not even a hedge, barely a tree to soften it, and landmarks turned into outlandish things, nothing natural or old or familiar. A single wind generator, vast up close, like something from space; a concrete silo as big as a tower block sitting alone in a field ringed with wire fencing; a stretch of shiny solar panels all tilted towards the flat grey sky.
    A truck had passed them going the other way at speed and it hadn’t slowed or conceded room on the narrow carriageway, roaring by so close the car shook and as Nathan at the wheel wrestled them back off the verge they could see the mud crusted on its big tyres.
    When they had got out of the car, finally, the first thing that had struck Fran was the noise: it was empty but it wasn’t quiet, and walking into the lee of the big house, the agent walking towards them, she could still hear it. A distant roar that must have been traffic on some far-off invisible motorway but felt like something stranger, diffusing uninterrupted across the plain like smoke.
    Beside her Nathan spread his arms like a king, looking up. ‘All this space,’ he said, and she had seen the wide pale sky reflected in his eyes, a great barrelling mass of cloud building along the horizon.

    Emme was in her room. With Gerard standing behind her Fran called up the stairs, sharp and urgent, and Emme appeared at the top. Her small face was pale.
    ‘I need you to wait up there for a bit, sweetheart,’ Fran told her. ‘I’ve just got to show the man something.’ She felt abruptly breathless, her heart speeding in her chest just at the thought of stepping back outside, as if he was still standing among the poplars, waiting. Someone killed your daddy .
    Who? Who? Who would kill him? Nathan, steady Nathan, husband and father, always in control, Nathan who never lost his temper. Did people die for barely any reason, on no provocation? She knew they did: a botched burglary, an idle beet-picker high on GHB, road rage. Spill the wrong man’s pint in a pub and he follows you home. But Nathan got back, he parked the car, he came inside our house and wiped his boots on the mat and hung up his coat. He came to bed. That was the part that made it her fault, she couldn’t get rid of that thought. If she’d done something