Fiona Barton - The Widow

“Thank you for listening. I would ask you to respect our privacy now as we try to rebuild our lives.”

I look at my shoes throughout, filling in the gaps in my head. Wonderful wife. This is my role now. The wonderful wife who stood by her husband.

There’s a single silent beat, and then the noise is deafening again. “Who do you think took Bella?” “What do you think of the police tactics, Glen?” Then a passerby shouts: “Well done, mate!” and Glen grins in response. It is the picture everyone uses the next day.

An arm snakes through the cameramen and hands me a card. It has Congratulations on it and a picture of a bottle of champagne with a cork popping. I try to see who the arm belongs to, but it’s been swallowed up, so I slide the card in my bag and am guided forward with Glen and Tom and some of the security people. The press comes, too. It’s like a swarm of bees moving in a cartoon.

That journey home is a taste of what is to come. The reporters and photographers block the way to the taxi Tom has got waiting for us, and we can’t move forward. People are pushing one another and us, shouting their stupid questions into our faces, shoving their cameras everywhere. Glen has my hand, and he suddenly makes a break for it, dragging me behind him. Tom has the door of the taxi open, and we throw ourselves into the backseat.

Cameras are slammed against the windows, flashing and banging, metal on glass. And we just sit there, like fish in an aquarium. The driver is sweating, but you can see he’s enjoying it. “Bloody hell,” he says. “What a circus!”

The journalists are still shouting: “What does it feel like to be a free man, Glen?” “What do you want to say to Bella’s mother?” “Do you blame the police?”

Of course he does blame them. He stews over it, the humiliation and the baby-doll pajamas. Funny how he can think about that when he’s been accused of killing a little girl, but getting even with the police becomes his new addiction.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The Widow

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 2, 2008

I’ve always wondered what it would feel like if I let out the secret. Sometimes I daydream about it and can hear myself saying: “My husband saw Bella the day she was taken.” And I feel the physical release, like a rush to the head.

But I can’t, can I? I’m as guilty as he is. It’s a strange feeling, owning a secret. It’s like a stone in my stomach, crushing my insides and making me feel sick every time I think of it. My friend Lisa used to talk about being pregnant like that—the baby pushing everything out of its way. Overwhelming her body. My secret does that. When it gets to be too much, I switch to being Jeanie for a while and pretend the secret belongs to someone else.

But that didn’t help when Bob Sparkes was questioning me the first time after Glen’s arrest. I felt heat rising through my body, my face red and my scalp pinpricked with sweat.

Bob Sparkes was trespassing in my lie. “So what did you say you did on the day Bella disappeared?”

My breathing became shallow, and I tried to catch and control it. But my voice betrayed me. It became a breathless squeak, a deafening dry gulp as I swallowed midsentence. I’m lying, my treacherous body said.

“Oh, in the morning, work, you know. I had a couple of highlights to do,” I say, hoping the truths in my lie will convince. I was at work, after all. Justify, justify, deny, deny. It ought to get easier, but it doesn’t, as each lie feels sourer and tighter, like an unripe apple. Unyielding and mouth-drying.

The simple lies are the hardest, funnily enough. The big ones seem to just fall off the tongue: “Glen? Oh, he left the bank because he has other ambitions. He wants to start his own transport company. Wants to be his own boss.” Easy.

But the little ones—“I can’t come out for a coffee because I’ve got to go to my mum’s”—stick and stutter, making me flush. Lisa didn’t seem to notice in the beginning, or if she did, she hid it well. We’re all living in my lie now.

I was never a liar as a child. My mum and dad would’ve been able to tell immediately, and I didn’t have a brother or sister to share a secret with. With Glen, it turned out, it was easy. We were a team, he’d say, after the police came around.

Funny, that. I hadn’t thought of us as a team for a long time before that. We each had our departments. But Bella’s disappearance brought us together. Made us a real couple. I always said we needed a child.

Ironic really. You see, I was going to leave him. After he was released by the court. After I knew all about his online stuff. His “sexcursions,” as he called them in the chat rooms. The stuff that he was going to put behind him.

You see, Glen likes to put things behind him. When he says it, it means we’ll never talk about it again. He can do that, just cut off a part of his life and let it drift away. “We need to be thinking of the future, Jeanie, not the past,” he’d explain patiently, drawing me closer, kissing my head.

It made sense when he said it like that, and I learned never to go back to the things we’d put behind us. It didn’t mean I didn’t think about them, but it was understood that I wouldn’t mention them again to him.

Not Being Able to Have a Baby was one of the things. And Losing His Job. And then The Chat Rooms and all the awful things with the police. “Let’s put it behind us, love,” he said the day after the court case ended. We were lying in bed; it was so early, the streetlights were still on, shining through a gap in the curtains. Neither of us had slept much—“Too much excitement,” Glen said.

He’d made some plans, he said. He’d decided to get back to a normal life—to our life—as quickly as possible to make things like they were before.

It sounded so simple when he said it, and I tried to put all the things I’d heard out of my mind, but they wouldn’t go. They kept hiding in corners and leering at me. I stewed for a few weeks before I made a decision. In the end, it was the pictures of children that made me pack a bag.

I’d stood by him from the day he was accused of Bella’s murder because I believed in him. I knew my Glen couldn’t do something so awful. But that was over now, thank God. He’d been found not guilty.

Now I had to look at the other stuff that he did do.

He denied it all when I said I couldn’t live with a man who looked at pictures like that.

“It’s not real, Jeanie. Our experts said in court that they’re not really kids in those pictures. They’re women who look really young and dress up as kids for a living. Some of them are really in their thirties.”

“But they look like children,” I shouted. “They do it for people who want to see children and men doing those things.”

He started to cry. “You can’t leave me, Jeanie,” he said. “I need you.” I shook my head and went and got my bag. I was shaking because I’d never seen Glen like this before. He was the one who was always in control. The Strong One.

And when I came downstairs, he was waiting to trap me with his confession.

You see, he told me he’d done something for me. He said he loved me. He knew I wanted a child so badly it was killing me and that was killing him, and when he saw her, he knew he could make me happy. It was for me.

He said it was like a dream. He stopped to eat his lunch and look at his paper in a side street and saw her at a garden gate, looking at him. She was alone. He couldn’t help himself. When he told me, he put his arms around me and I couldn’t move.

“I wanted to bring her home for you. She was standing there, and I smiled at her, and she put her arms up to me. She wanted me to pick her up.

“I got out of the van, but I don’t remember anything else. Next thing, I was driving the van home to you. I didn’t hurt her, Jeanie,” he said. “It was like a dream.