The Widow

Chapter 34

Thursday, 2 October 2008

The Widow

I WAS SHAKING when we got into the lawyer’s. Not sure if it was anger or nerves – a bit of both, probably, and even Mr Smoothie put his arm round me. ‘Bloody stunt merchants,’ he said to Tom Payne. ‘We should Press Council them or something.’

I kept replaying it in my head, from the moment I realized it was her. I should’ve recognized her straight away, I’ve seen her enough times on the telly and in court. But it’s different when you see someone in the street where you’re not expecting them to be. You don’t really look at people’s faces, I think, just their outlines. Of course, as soon as I really looked at her I knew it was her. Dawn Elliott. The mother. Standing there with the idiots from the Herald, egging her on, and accusing my Glen when he’s been found Not Guilty. It’s not right. It’s not fair.

I suppose it was the shock that made me shout at her like that.

Glen was angry that I told her what I thought. ‘It’ll just keep everyone going, Jean. She’ll feel she has to defend herself and keep giving interviews. I told you to keep quiet.’

I said I was sorry, but I wasn’t. I meant every word. I’ll do a phone-in tonight and say it again. It felt good to say it out loud, in public. People should know it’s all her fault. She was responsible for our little girl and she let her get taken.

They sat me down with a hot drink in the clerk’s room while they got on with the meeting. I wasn’t in the mood for legal stuff anyway, so I sat quietly in a corner, replaying the row in the street in my head and sort of listening to the secretaries’ chatter. Invisible again.

It took ages for the meeting to end and then we had to discuss how we were going to get out without the press seeing us. In the end, we went out the back, down an alleyway where they put the bins and bikes. ‘They won’t be hanging around now, but there’s no point taking chances,’ Tom said. ‘It’ll be on their website by now and all over the paper tomorrow. It’ll put up the damages – just keep thinking about the money.’

Glen shook his hand and I just sort of waved. I don’t want the money. I want it to stop.

He was extra nice to me when we got in, taking my coat off and making me sit with my feet up while he put the kettle on.

It’s the anniversary today. I’d marked it in my diary with a dot. A little dot that could be a slip of the pen so no one else would know if they looked.

Two years since she was taken. They’ll never find her now – the people who took her must have persuaded everyone by now that she is theirs and she must think they are her mum and dad. She’s little and she probably hardly remembers her real mother. I hope she’s happy and they love her as much as I would if she was here with me.

For a moment, I can see her sitting on our stairs, bumping down on her bottom and laughing. Calling for me to come and watch her. She could’ve been here if Glen had brought her home to me.

Glen hasn’t said much since we got back. He’s got his computer on his knee and closes it quickly when I go to sit next to him. ‘What were you looking at, love?’ I ask.

‘Just flicking through the sports pages,’ he says and then goes to put petrol in the car.

I pick up the computer and open it. It says it’s locked and I sit and stare at the screen, at the photo of me Glen has put on it. There I am, locked like the computer.

When he comes home, I try to talk to him about the future. ‘Why don’t we move, Glen? Have the fresh start we keep talking about? We’re never going to escape this unless we do.’

‘We’re not moving, Jean,’ he snaps at me. ‘This is our home and I won’t be driven out of it. We’re going to weather this. Together. The press will forget about us in the end and move on to some other poor sod.’

‘They won’t,’ I want to say. Every anniversary of Bella’s disappearance, every time a child goes missing, every time there is a quiet news day, they’ll come back. And we’ll just be sitting here, waiting.

‘There are so many nice places to live, Glen. We’ve talked about living by the sea one day. We could do that now. We could even move abroad.’

‘Abroad? What the hell are you talking about? I don’t want to live somewhere I can’t speak the language. I’m staying put.’

So we do. We might as well have moved to a desert island in the end as we are completely isolated in our little house. Just the sharks circling occasionally. We keep each other company, doing the crossword together in the kitchen – him reading out the clues and writing the answers in while I’m still guessing, watching films together in the living room, me learning to knit, him chewing his nails. Like an old retired couple. I’m not even forty yet.

‘I think the Mannings’ poodle must’ve died. It’s been weeks since any dog shit has been left on the doorstep,’ Glen says conversationally. ‘It was very old.’

The graffiti persists. That paint is terrible to get off and neither of us want to stand there in full view, scrubbing at it, so it stays. ‘SCUM’ and ‘PEEDOFILE’ in big red letters on the garden wall. ‘Kids,’ Glen says. ‘From the local comprehensive, if the spelling’s anything to go by.’

There are letters from the ‘green biro brigade’ most weeks, but we’ve started putting them straight in the bin. You can tell them a mile off. I never see those tiny envelopes or the green pens they use for sale – the poisonous people must have their own source of them and the rough, lined notepaper they prefer. I suppose it must be cheap.

I used to look at the handwriting to try and guess what sort of person had sent it. Some are all loops and swirls – the sort of writing on a wedding invitation – and I think they must be written by old people. No one else writes like that any more.

They’re not all anonymous. Some write their address in spidery writing on the top – lovely names like ‘Rose Cottage’ or ‘The Willows’ – and then spew out their bile underneath. I’m so tempted to write back and tell them what I think of them – give them a dose of their own medicine. I write the replies in my head when I’m pretending to watch the television, but I don’t take it any further. It would cause trouble.

‘They’re just sick, Jeanie,’ Glen says each time one plops through the letterbox. ‘We should feel sorry for them, really.’

Sometimes I wonder who they are and then I think they are probably people like me and Glen. Lonely people. People on the edge of things. Prisoners in their own homes.

I buy a big jigsaw at the local charity shop. It’s a picture of a beach with cliffs and seagulls. It’ll give me something to do in the afternoons. It’s going to be a long winter.