Fiona Barton - The Widow

“Do you think it was a dream, Jeanie?”

His story is so shocking, I’m choking on its details.

We’re standing in our hallway, and I can see our reflection in the mirror. It’s like seeing it happening in a film. Glen is bending down so our heads touch, sobbing on my shoulder, with me, deathly pale. I’m patting his hair and shushing him. But I don’t want him to stop crying. I’m afraid of the silence that will follow. There is so much I want to ask, but so much I don’t want to know.

Glen stops after a while, and we sit on the sofa together.

“Shouldn’t we tell the police? Tell them you saw her that day?” I ask. I have to say it out loud or my head will burst. He stiffens beside me. “They’ll say I took her and killed her, Jeanie. And you know I didn’t. Even seeing her will make me the guilty man, the man they put in prison. We can’t say anything. To anyone.”

I sit, unable to speak. He is right, though. Seeing Bella would be as good as taking her, as far as Bob Sparkes is concerned.

I just keep thinking Glen can’t have taken her.

He just saw her. That’s it. He just saw her. He didn’t do anything wrong.

He’s still gulping from the sobs, and his face is red and wet. “I keep thinking maybe I did dream it. It didn’t feel real, and you know I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he says, and I nod. I think I know, but really, I don’t know anything about this man that I’ve lived with all these years. He’s a stranger, but we’re bound together tighter than we’ve ever been. He knows me. He knows my weakness.

He knows that I would’ve wanted him to take her and bring her home.

I know that I caused all this trouble with my obsession.

Afterward, when I’m in the kitchen making him a cup of tea, I realize he didn’t use Bella’s name, like she isn’t real to him. I take my bag back upstairs and unpack my things while Glen lies on the sofa, watching football on the telly. Like normal. Like nothing has happened.

We don’t talk about Bella again. Glen is very nice to me, telling me he loves me all the time, checking up to make sure I’m all right. Checking on me. “What are you up to, Jeanie?” he says when he rings my mobile. And so we carry on.

But Bella is with us all the time. We don’t talk about her, don’t mention her name. We carry on as my secret starts to grow inside me, kicking at my heart and stomach, making me throw up in the downstairs toilet when I wake up and remember.

He was drawn to Bella because of me. He wanted to find a baby for me. And I wonder what I would’ve done if he had brought her home to me. I would’ve loved her. That’s what I would’ve done. Just loved her. She would’ve been mine to love.

She was almost mine.

Glen and I still shared a bed afterward. My mum couldn’t believe it. “How can you bear to have him near you, Jean? After all the things he did with those women—and that man?”

Mum and I never talked about sex, normally. It was my best friend at school who’d told me how babies were made and about periods. Mum wasn’t very easy talking about things like that. It was like it was dirty, somehow. I suppose Glen’s sex life being in the papers made it easier for her to say it out loud. After all, everyone else in the country knew about it. It was like talking about someone she didn’t really know.

“It wasn’t real, Mum. It was all make-believe,” I told her, not catching her eye. “It’s something all men do in their heads, the psychologist said.”

“Your father doesn’t,” she said.

“Anyway, we’ve decided to put it all behind us and look to the future, Mum.”

She looked at me like she was going to say something important but then stopped. “It’s your life, Jean. You must do what you think best.”

“Our life, Mum. Mine and Glen’s.”

Glen said I should start looking for a little job. Outside the area.

I told him I was nervous about facing strangers, but we agreed I needed something to keep me busy. And out of the house.

Glen said he’d go back to the idea of starting his own business. But not driving this time. Something on the Internet. Some kind of service.

“Everyone’s doing it, Jeanie. Easy money, and I’ve got the skills.”

I wanted to say so many things, but it seemed best to keep quiet.

Our attempt at looking to the future lasted about two months. I’d begun working Fridays and Saturdays at a big salon in town. Big enough to be anonymous with lots of walk-ins and not too many prying questions. Classier than Hair Today and the hair products were very expensive. You could tell they cost a fortune because they smelled of almonds. On my workdays, I caught the tube up to Bond Street and walked the rest. It felt okay, better than I thought.

Glen stayed at home in front of his screen, “building his empire,” as he called it. He was buying and selling stuff on eBay. Car stuff. There were always parcels being delivered and clogging up the hall, but it kept him busy. I helped a bit, wrapping things up and going to the post office for him. We got into a routine.

But neither of us could put the case behind us. I couldn’t stop thinking about Bella. My almost little girl. I found myself thinking it should’ve been us. She should have been here with us. Our baby. Sometimes I found myself wishing he had picked her up that day.

But Glen wasn’t thinking about Bella. He couldn’t put the entrapment behind him. It weighed on his mind. I could see him brooding, working himself up, and every time there was something on the telly about the police, he’d sit there fuming, saying how they’d ruined his life. I tried to persuade him to let it go, to look to the future, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

He must’ve made a phone call, because Tom Payne came to see us one Thursday morning to explain about suing the Hampshire Police Force. We’d get compensation for what they put Glen through, he said.

“So we should. I was locked up for months because of their tricks,” Glen said, and I went to make some tea.

When I came back, they were working out figures on Tom’s big yellow pad. He was always good at numbers, Glen. So clever. When they did the last calculation, Tom said, “I reckon you should get about a quarter of a million,” and Glen whooped like we’d won the lottery. I wanted to say that we didn’t need the money—that I didn’t want this dirty money. But I just smiled and went over and held Glen’s hand.

It was a long process, but it gave Glen a new focus. The eBay parcels stopped arriving, and instead, he sat at the kitchen table with his paperwork, reading reports and crossing stuff out, highlighting other bits with new colored pens, punching holes in documents and filing them in his different folders. Sometimes he read a bit out to me, to see what I thought.

“The effect of the case and the stigma attached to it mean that Mr. Taylor now suffers frequent panic attacks when he leaves the house.”

“Do you?” I asked. I hadn’t noticed. Not like my mum’s panic attacks, anyway.

“Well, I feel churned up inside,” he said. “Do you think they’ll want a doctor’s note?”

We didn’t go out much anyway. Just to the shops and once to the pictures. We tended to go very early and shop in big, anonymous supermarkets where you don’t have to talk to anyone, but he was nearly always recognized. Not surprising really. His picture was in the papers every day when the trial was on, and the girls on the tills knew it was him. I said I’d go on my own, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He wouldn’t let me face it alone. He held my hand and braved it out, and I learned to give anyone who dared say a word a look, to shut them up.

It was more difficult when I met people I knew. When they saw me, some crossed the road, pretended they hadn’t noticed me. Others wanted to know everything. I found myself saying the same thing over and over: “We’re fine. We knew the truth would come out—that Glen is innocent. The police have got a lot to answer for.”