Fiona Barton - The Widow

An hour later, I’m lying on the bed in a hotel dressing gown, floating just above the covers, I feel so relaxed. Glen would’ve said I smell 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 shopping 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 con man.

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

“I love that color. 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 afterward, 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 a victim of a police plot. She stood by the man she married. The man she chose.

At first Jeanie reappeared only 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 the 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.

Of 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 anymore.

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 around 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?” “Mr. Harris” 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 around 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 loved children.

Then they left, Glen and the policemen. Glen told me later that he said good-bye 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 around and around in my brain, I kept thinking about his face and how I didn’t know him for a second.

He told me later someone had said he’d been making a delivery near where Bella disappeared, but that didn’t mean anything. Just a 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 saw 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 and a 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 either. I thought he was going to hit me; I watched his fists clench and unclench at his sides, me 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 on the sofa bed in the spare room, 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 where he’d hung them on the banister 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 behavior,” “inappropriate,” and “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.