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

different in bed, if she’d said the right thing, if she’d turned and held on to him, in the dark.
    She swallowed. ‘Emme?’
    ‘Is it about Daddy?’ said Emme, solemn, not moving, and Fran took a deep breath.
    ‘Yes,’ she said, then quickly, thinking, Don’t tell her any more, mustn’t frighten her, ‘Just stay up there. Please. I won’t be long.’
    She walked past Gerard in the kitchen, quickly; she didn’t want him to see how afraid she was. She was at the door and turning the handle, dizzy with panic but still moving, and then DS Gerard was behind her in the yard. She kept on, one foot behind the other, and then they were past the shed and the horizon yawned. The huge sky was streaked across with the remains of rain cloud, tinged pink towards the east: this was what Nathan had wanted. The big skies, his kingdom. The pale tent gleamed at its centre; a man in a white hooded boiler suit straightened from what looked like a toolbox to look at them. Another suited figure emerged from the tent to stand beside him.
    She must have staggered because the horizon tipped and then Gerard was next to her, with his hand tight on her arm. ‘Are you all right?’ he said. She wanted to shake him off but the pressure on her arm steadied her, and she stood stiffly. She couldn’t look at the white tent but wherever she looked it sat at the edge of her vision. ‘This can wait,’ Gerard said. ‘We can come back with the FLO later, the weather’s going to hold.’
    Fran stared at him. ‘No,’ she said, clenched. She looked towards the poplars and for a second she thought he was there, standing motionless between the leafless trees. She froze.
    ‘See something?’ asked Gerard, quickly. The row of bare trees. No one there.
    ‘No,’ she said, with a gasp, ‘no, I … nothing.’ She began to walk stiffly across the yellow grass, soaked with last night’s rain. The sound of run-off trickling in the ditches in her ears, under the distant hum of traffic they couldn’t see. The chicken barn’s roof had a dull sheen, and the field under its stubble was wet, sticky: she heard Gerard make a sound of disgust, lifting a shoe clogged with mud.
    ‘The pub.’ She stopped abruptly. ‘He’d been to the pub, he came home. The Queen’s Head. Maybe someone there … maybe something happened. Maybe someone followed him home.’
    ‘You did tell us,’ said Gerard, and she thought his eyes slid away from her. ‘We’ll go through it again at the station.’ He gestured ahead. ‘One thing at a time.’
    Her heart pounding, she worked her way round, walking away from the men along the ditch to the place where there was a plank set over it. The road was beyond them, perhaps half a mile away, the row of trees – she fixed her eyes on them as she walked, watching. The same road that other car had been travelling on, the car whose headlights had swept the flat land at some time after two in the morning. That morning: it seemed to her not just longer ago but in a different life.
    One foot then the other and there, where it was dark behind her eyes, the figures moved in the landscape, two a.m. Nathan walked out across the field to the ditch, someone followed him – or waited for him. She thought of the blood, the front of his body soaked, blood congealing sticky on her hands as she pulled at his deadweight.
    She stopped, trying to subdue the shivering that rose inside her and failing, looked from the tent to the road, gauging angles, distance.
    ‘There.’ She pointed and Gerard was kneeling in the mud, he was looking.
    ‘Right,’ he said, interested at last. ‘Yes.’
    When they got back to the kitchen DS Gerard had asked her if she’d be all right to take Emme to school on her own. ‘Ed can come with you,’ he said, shifting as she fed Emme’s arms into the sleeves of her coat at the table.
    Out in the black field, standing beside him, she had heard his breath catch and accelerate as he peered down between his knees into the