The Widow

Chapter 28

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

The Widow

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 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 mid-sentence. I’m lying, my treacherous body was saying.

‘Oh, in the morning, work, you know. I had a couple of highlights to do,’ I said, hoping the truths in my lie would 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 were 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 round.

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 street lights 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 looked 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 round 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. 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.

Afterwards, when I’m in the kitchen making him a cup of tea, I realize he didn’t use Bella’s name, as though 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 afterwards. 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 as if 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 as though 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 just over a month. 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 work days, I caught the tube up to Bond Street and walked the rest. It felt OK, 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 find myself thinking it should’ve been us. She should be here with us. Our baby. Sometimes I find myself wishing he had picked her up that day.

But Glen isn’t thinking about Bella. He can’t put the entrapment behind him. It weighs on his mind. I can see him brooding, working himself up, and every time there’s something on the telly about the police, he sits there fuming, saying how they’ve ruined his life. I’ve tried to persuade him to let it go, to look to the future, but he doesn’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’d put Glen through, he said.

‘So they 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’s a long process but it gives Glen a new focus. The eBay parcels stop arriving and instead he sits at the kitchen table with his paperwork, reading reports and crossing stuff out, highlighting other bits with new coloured pens, punching holes in documents and filing them in his different folders. Sometimes he reads a bit out to me, to see what I think.

‘The effect of the case and the stigma attached to it means that Mr Taylor now suffers frequent panic attacks when he leaves the house.’

‘Do you?’ I ask. I hadn’t noticed. Not like my mum’s panic attacks, anyway.

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

We don’t go out much anyway. Just to the shops and once to the pictures. We tend to go very early and shop in big, anonymous supermarkets where you don’t have to talk to anyone, but he’s 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 know it’s him. I’ve said I’ll go on my own but he won’t hear of it. He won’t let me face it alone. He holds my hand and braves it out and I learn to give anyone who dares say a word a look, to shut them up.

It’s more difficult when I meet people I know. When they see me, some cross the road, pretend they haven’t noticed me. Others want to know everything. I find 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.’

Mostly, people seem glad for us, but not all. One of my old clients from the salon said, ‘Hmm. But none of us are completely innocent, are we?’

I told her it had been lovely to see her but I had to get back to help Glen.

‘It’ll mean going back to court,’ I work myself up to say to him one day. ‘Having everything dug up again and gone through. I’m not sure-’

Glen stands and holds me. ‘I know it’s hard for you, love, but this will be my vindication. This will make sure people know what I went through. What we went through.’

I see the sense in that and try to be more helpful, remembering dates and terrible encounters with people in public to put in his evidence. ‘Remember that bloke at the cinema? He said he wouldn’t sit in the same room as a paedophile. Shouted it and pointed at you.’

Of course Glen remembers. We had to be escorted out of Screen 2 by Security ‘for our own safety’, the manager said. The bloke kept shouting, ‘What about Bella?’ and the woman with him was trying to make him sit down.

I wanted to say something – that my husband was innocent – but Glen gripped my arm and said, ‘Don’t, Jean. It’ll make it worse. He’s just some nutter.’

He doesn’t like remembering this but he writes it down in his statement. ‘Thanks, love,’ he says.

The police resist the compensation claim – Tom says they have to because it is taxpayers’ money they will have to pay out – until the very last minute. I’m getting dressed in my court outfit when Glen, already in his good suit and shoes, gets a call from Tom.

‘It’s over, Jeanie,’ he shouts up the stairs. ‘They’ve paid up. Quarter of a million.’

The papers and Dawn Elliott call it blood money, made on the back of her little girl. The reporters write horrible things about Glen again and they are back outside. I want to say ‘I told you so,’ but what good would that do?

Glen goes quiet again and I pack in the job before they can let me go.

Back to where we started.