Fiona Barton - The Widow

DI Bob Sparkes has been a part of my life for so long—more than three years it is now—but I think perhaps he will disappear with you, Glen.

I don’t say any of this to Kate Waters. She’s in the other armchair in the sitting room, nursing her mug of tea and jiggling her foot.

“Jean,” she says—no more “Mrs. Taylor,” I notice—“this last week must have been terrible for you. And after all you’ve already been through.” I say nothing, just stare at my lap. She has no idea what I’ve been through. No one has really. I’ve never been able to tell anyone. Glen said that was best.

We wait in silence, and then she tries a different tack. She stands up and picks up a photo of us from the mantelpiece—both of us laughing at something.

“You look so young,” she says. “Was this before you got married?”

I nod.

“Did you know each other a long time before that? Did you meet at school?”

“No, not at school. We met at a bus stop,” I tell her. “He was very good-looking, and he made me laugh. I was seventeen, an apprentice at a hairdresser’s in Greenwich, and he worked in a bank. He was a bit older and wore a suit and good shoes. He was different.”

I’m making it sound like some romantic novel, and Kate Waters is lapping it up, scribbling in her notebook, peering at me over those little glasses and nodding as if she understands. She isn’t fooling me.

Actually, Glen didn’t seem the romantic sort at first. Our courtship was mainly in the dark—the cinema, the backseat of his Escort, the park—and there wasn’t much time for talking. But I remember the first time he told me he loved me. I prickled all over, like I could feel every inch of my skin. I felt alive for the first time in my life. I told him I loved him, too. Desperately. That I couldn’t eat or sleep for thinking about him.

My mum said it was a “fascination” on my part when I mooned around the house. I wasn’t sure what it meant, “fascination,” but I wanted to be with Glen all the time, and back then he said he felt the same. I think Mum was a bit jealous. She relied on me.

“She relies on you too much, Jeanie,” Glen said. “Not healthy to be going everywhere with your daughter.”

I tried to explain about Mum being frightened of going out on her own, but Glen said she was being selfish.

He was so protective, picking a seat for me in the pub away from the bar—“Don’t want it to be too noisy for you”—and ordering for me at restaurants so I tasted new things—“You’ll love this, Jeanie. Just try it.” So I did, and sometimes the new things were lovely. And if they weren’t, I didn’t say anything in case I hurt his feelings. He would go quiet if I went against him. I hated that. Felt I’d disappointed him.

I’d never been out with someone like Glen, someone who knew what they wanted in life. The other boys were just that, boys.

Two years later, when Glen proposed, he didn’t go down on one knee. He held me very close and said, “You belong to me, Jeanie. We belong together . . . Let’s get married.”

He’d won Mum over by then, anyway, He’d come with flowers—“a little something for the other woman in my life,” he’d say to make her giggle—and he’d talk to her about Coronation Street or the royal family, and Mum loved it. She said I was a lucky girl. That he’d brought me out of myself. Would make something of me. She could see he’d take care of me. And he did.

“What was he like then?” Kate Waters asks, leaning forward to encourage me. Then. She means before all the bad stuff.

“Oh, he was a lovely man. Very lovey-dovey, couldn’t do enough for me,” I say. “Always bringing me flowers and presents. Said I was the one. I was blown over by it all. I was only seventeen.”

She loves it. Writes it all down in a funny scrawl and looks up. I’m trying not to laugh. I feel the hysteria rising, but it comes out like a sob, and she reaches her hand over to touch my arm.

“Don’t be upset,” she says. “It’s all over now.”

And it is. No more police, no more Glen. No more of his nonsense.

I can’t quite remember when I started calling it that. It had begun long before I could name it. I was too busy making our marriage perfect, beginning with the wedding at Charlton House.

My mum and dad thought I was too young at nineteen, but we persuaded them. Well, Glen did, really. He was so determined, so devoted to me, and in the end Dad said yes, and we celebrated with a bottle of Lambrusco.

They paid a fortune for the wedding because I was their only one, and I spent my whole time looking at pictures in bridal magazines with Mum and dreaming of my big day. My big day. How I clung to that and filled my life with it. Glen never interfered.

“That’s your department,” he’d say, and laugh.

He made it sound like he had a department, too. I thought it was probably his job; he was the main breadwinner, he said. “I know it sounds old-fashioned, Jeanie, but I want to look after you. You’re still very young, and we’ve got everything in front of us.”

He always had big ideas, and they sounded so exciting when he talked about them. He was going to be the manager of the branch, then leave to start his own business, be his own boss and make lots of money. I could see him in a posh suit with a secretary and a big car. And me, I was going to be there for him. “Never change, Jeanie. I love you just the way you are,” he’d say.

So we bought number 12 and moved in after the wedding. We’re still here all these years later.

The house had a front garden, but we graveled over “to save on cutting the grass,” Glen said. I quite liked the grass, but Glen liked things neat. It was hard at the beginning, when we first moved in together, because I was always a bit untidy. Mum was always finding dirty plates and odd socks in the fluff under my bed at home. Glen would’ve died if he’d looked.

I can see him now, clenching his teeth and his eyes going all narrow when he caught me brushing crumbs off the table onto the floor with my hand after we had tea one night, early on. Didn’t even know I was doing it—must’ve done it a hundred times without thinking, but I never did it again. He was good for me in that way, taught me how to do things right so the house was nice. He liked it nice.

In the early days Glen told me all about his job in the bank—the responsibilities he had, how the juniors relied on him, the jokes the staff played on one another, the boss he couldn’t stand—“Thinks he’s better than everyone, Jeanie”—and the people he worked with. Joy and Liz in the back office; Scott, one of the counter staff, who had terrible skin and blushed over everything; May, the trainee who kept making mistakes. I loved listening to him, loved hearing about his world.

I suppose I did tell him about my work, but we seemed to drift back to the bank quite quickly.

“Hairdressing isn’t the most exciting job,” he’d say, “but you do it very well, Jeanie. I’m very proud of you.”

He was trying to make me feel better about myself, he told me. And he did. It felt so safe being loved by Glen.

Kate Waters is looking at me, doing that thing with her head again. She’s good. I’ll give her that. I’ve never spoken to a journalist before, apart from telling them to go away, never mind let one in the house. They’ve been coming to the door for years on and off, and no one has got inside until today. Glen saw to that.

But he’s not here now. And Kate Waters seems different. She’s told me she feels “a real connection” with me. Says she feels like we’ve known each other for ages. And I know what she means.

“His death must’ve come as a terrible shock,” she says, giving my arm another squeeze. I nod dumbly.