The Missing Husband Read online

  Jo felt a sharp sting where the rusted mesh had scratched her but she was more concerned with the panic bubbling up like lava from the pit of her stomach. If David had been with her, they wouldn’t have given the boys a second glance and his absence weighed heavily on her chest. For a moment she couldn’t catch her breath and her lungs began to burn.

  ‘Are you all right, love?’ the boy holding the ball asked.

  He was about Lauren’s age and it was entirely possible that they went to the same school. The deliberate thought was meant to calm Jo but her body had a mind of its own. ‘Yes,’ she gasped, with what little air she could squeeze from her lungs.

  She managed to collect herself and, placing a protective hand over her bump, scurried past as someone accused the boy of fancying her. An argument broke out but their voices quickly receded into the distance and she focused on reaching the end of the path. With a cry, Jo burst out of the shadows on to a brightly lit road only two streets away from home. She tried to catch her breath and slow her pace but fear continued to prick the length of her spine. She had an unshakeable conviction that someone was stalking her and kept looking behind until eventually she couldn’t resist the urge to run. She must have looked a sight as she hung on to her bags and her belly for dear life but she didn’t care.

  A gasp of relief burst from her lungs the moment she slammed the front door shut and pressed her back against it before sliding down on to the floor. The quick gulps of air slowly amassed enough breath to let out an anguished sob. The sob caught in her throat as the sound of the house phone ringing cut through the darkness.

  ‘It’s looking like he’s left you then.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum, that makes me feel a whole lot better,’ Jo said, her hand on her chest as she tried to remember how to breathe. She was still letting the disappointment sink in that it hadn’t been David. Even a call from the police with news of a sighting would have been more welcome, but on a positive note, a conversation with her mother was guaranteed to rile her enough to put the fight back in her belly.

  ‘Sorry, love, I don’t mean to sound blunt but even if he did turn up now with his tail between his legs, it’s been three days without so much as a word. I don’t know about you but I won’t forgive him for what he’s put you through.’

  After picking up the phone, Jo’s subconscious had guided her to the armchair that had the best view of the clock above the fireplace. ‘We all do things we regret, Mum,’ Jo said, unsure if it was a dig at her mother for her own past indiscretions, or a reminder that Jo carried her own guilt. ‘And right now I’d forgive him anything if only he’d come home safe – and I would expect you to do the same.’

  There was silence on the other end of the line. They would have to agree to disagree so her mum changed tack. ‘Have you checked your bank? You have a joint account, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong there. It hasn’t been used since last weekend.’ Jo withheld the fact that they both also had separate accounts. They each contributed to the joint account to pay all the household bills, but their salaries were paid into their own accounts to be used for their own pleasures and shared luxuries. While Jo’s savings tended to be spent on more homely pleasures like a new kitchen, David’s money had funded their holidays and satisfied his wanderlust. She didn’t have access to that account but she imagined it would be enough to keep her errant husband in food and shelter for a good few months if that was his intention.

  ‘Put a block on the account if you can,’ Liz warned. ‘Or better still, empty it before he does.’

  ‘Mum, I’m not about to draw battle lines until I know there’s a war to be had.’

  Liz’s breathing quickened, giving away her agitation. ‘Well, more fool you. Maybe I should come down and help for a while.’

  ‘There’s nothing to do, honestly. Steph is looking after me just fine.’

  ‘Change the locks too,’ her mother blurted out.

  Jo welcomed the rising anger that formed a barrier against the tidal wave of fear that had carried her home. ‘At what point did your beloved son-in-law become the devil incarnate? I may not be in a position to argue against the possibility that David has left me, but I don’t and won’t believe that he would leave me destitute.’

  ‘Your dad’s back on Wednesday so if David hasn’t appeared by next weekend, I’m coming down. No arguments, Joanne.’

  Jo didn’t argue. Next weekend was a whole week away, and judging by the last seventy-two hours, that was an eternity. When she finally got her mother off the phone, Jo couldn’t draw her eyes away from the starburst clock, its sharp points stabbing at her heart. She didn’t know how she would get through the next hour let alone the next seven days.

  When the phone rang again a few minutes later, Jo was holding two small batteries. She let them roll off the palm of her hand and into the waste bin and, as she took the call, glanced up only briefly at the clock which was now frozen in time at ten minutes past seven.

  ‘Steve’s been interviewed by the police again,’ Irene said before Jo had a chance to say hello.

  David’s mum had been following the police investigations obsessively. She hadn’t waited for DS Baxter to contact her but had turned up at the police station with Steve on Friday morning and by all accounts it had been Irene conducting the interrogation. After years of being lost in the wilderness, her mother-in-law had found a new purpose in life: to find her son or at least find out why he had left. That ought to have comforted Jo – she wanted someone to keep the police on their toes, but it was making her uneasy. When Jo and David had announced that they were having a baby, they had told everyone how it had been a surprise to both of them. It was only a matter of time before Irene discovered who she could blame for David’s disappearance.

  But that was for the future. In the present, Irene told her that Steve had been asked to return to the police station, only this time without his mum.

  ‘Have they come up with something new, then?’ Jo asked but without any real hope. She wasn’t surprised the police would want to speak to Steve without Irene shadowing him and didn’t suspect any ulterior motives. They would get a far better insight from David’s brother without his mother there to monitor any revelations, but if that had led to any significant development, Martin Baxter would have been in touch with her by now.

  By way of an answer, Irene asked another question. ‘Did the police ask you about David’s state of mind?’

  ‘Yes, sort of,’ Jo replied, slightly taken aback by the question. ‘I told them he wasn’t happy because I’d refused to give him a lift to Lime Street.’

  ‘But did they ask you if he was depressed?’

  Irene spoke so softly her voice was slurred and it took Jo a moment to realize what she was asking her, or to be more precise, what the police were considering. Her grip on the phone tightened and she became aware of a pain in the palm of her hand. ‘No, not really. They asked me some general questions about David’s health and his state of mind but I didn’t think it was something they would pursue,’ she said as she tried to think back to the night before last when she had laid bare the faults in her marriage to DS Baxter. She had thought the conversation had led them both to the conclusion that David had walked out on her; but had it been leading the policeman down another route?

  ‘Do you think he could have been so unhappy that he would …? You know …’

  ‘No, Irene,’ Jo said quickly. ‘No, it never entered my head; not once. He wouldn’t. He loves life.’ Jo stopped to take a breath and in that moment an internal voice asked if he loved life quite so much after she had clipped his wings. She pushed the thought away and tried to sound convinced as she said, ‘He wouldn’t give up without a fight, Irene. Not David.’

  ‘I keep asking myself if there was something he said, some kind of hint he might have dropped that might explain what was going on inside his head.’

  Jo squeezed her eyes shut. Stop this, Irene, she pleaded silently. Stop giving me new ways to torture
myself, new ways to blame myself.

  ‘I try to remember,’ Irene continued, ‘but my heart’s pounding so hard I can’t hear his voice any more. Only endless questions.’ On the other end of the phone there was a series of thumps and Jo pictured Irene banging her palm against her chest. ‘Questions, questions, questions. No answers.’

  The slur in Irene’s voice had become more pronounced and only now did Jo realize that her mother-in-law had been drinking. She wasn’t a heavy drinker by any stretch of the imagination although she did like a nightcap these days to ease her loneliness as she adjusted to life without Alan. It was apparent that her usual tipple had been more generous and earlier than usual.

  ‘It’s good that the police are considering every possible option but David wasn’t suicidal, Irene. I won’t even consider that possibility.’ Irene started to say something else; something that would pull Jo down into the murky depths of her despair where she imagined finding the bloated body of her husband after he had jumped into the river; so she cut in quickly, ‘Why don’t you have an early night and I’ll speak to you tomorrow?’

  ‘There’s no point; I can’t sleep. I won’t be able to rest until we’ve found him.’

  ‘Try,’ Jo pleaded, as much to get her off the phone as anything else. ‘And I really should go. I don’t want to keep the line busy in case someone’s trying to get through.’

  It was a trick Jo had been using for two days and, for the time being at least, it still worked and she managed to persuade Irene to hang up. When she replaced the phone on the receiver Jo considered unplugging it. She’d just about had enough for one day, but there was no real choice, not when the next call might be David.

  Her thoughts and emotions had been spinning faster and faster since leaving Steph’s and now they were no more than a blur. The only thing that did come into sharp focus was the smear of blood on the handset. She checked the palm of her right hand and saw that it was grazed and muddied with a mixture of dried blood and rust. From her hand she looked up at the frozen hands of the dial. There was blood on the clock too and on the wall. She hadn’t even noticed that she had cut her hand on the rusted fence in the cut-through.

  When she moved, everything appeared to be in slow motion including her thoughts. Her steps were measured as she headed to the kitchen to clean her wounds. The antiseptic stung but it was a pain she welcomed because it was something she understood and she focused on it until it blocked out everything else.

  Like the silent clock on the wall, time lost all meaning for Jo and the next thing she knew she was in her bedroom. She pulled the plug on the alarm clock on her bedside cabinet without bothering to check the hour. It would have surprised her to see that it was approaching morning, with only a few hours until sunrise. Lying on her back as she waited for sleep, Jo asked simply, ‘Where are you, David?’ then strained her ears as if waiting for an answer. The silence was deafening.

  9

  When Jo awoke on Sunday morning, consciousness arrived in the form of a series of thoughts, each one adding a leaden weight to her chest. Her misery was crushing and yet she still managed to drag herself to the bathroom in time to throw up. After dry retching for five minutes, she straightened up and looked at herself in the bathroom mirror. She barely recognized herself in the dim light borrowed from the bedroom. Her face was gaunt, her long hair dull and greasy and her fringe stuck out at all angles. To accessorize the haunted look she had carried through to a fourth day, her eyes were framed with dark, puffy bags. Jo leant forward until her head was resting on the bathroom cabinet. The cold surface of the mirror soothed her throbbing forehead. ‘I want to go back,’ she whispered. ‘I want to go back and make it all better.’

  As if her words could weave magic, Jo sensed David standing behind her. She closed her eyes and time slipped seamlessly back to what had been little more than a month ago although it was starting to feel much longer. Immersing herself in the memory, she felt her husband place his hands on her hips and then pull her close. She could feel his body pushing against hers and she pulled herself up until she was leaning back against him.

  ‘Hello, beautiful,’ he whispered into her ear before nibbling her lobe.

  Jo could feel her body responding to his and she reached behind her, grabbing his bare legs and pushing him against her. She groaned as she felt his hands sliding over the smooth material of her satin camisole, touching her breasts and then roaming ever downwards. Her skin tingled as his hand followed the rising curve of her stomach without any sign of trepidation. He wasn’t frightened any more.

  Her pulse raced with excitement as she put her hand over his to keep it there. She held her breath and a second later David jerked his hand away with a gasp.

  ‘Did you feel that?’ he asked.

  Jo took hold of his hand again and pressed it against her abdomen. ‘That’s your baby.’

  David rested his chin on her shoulder. She could feel his breath warm her neck as he laughed.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  Jo was tempted to point out that he’d had plenty of opportunity to acknowledge the changes in her body and accept there was a baby growing inside her but she didn’t want to sully the moment. ‘And next week we get to see him or her,’ she said, referring to the appointment for her twenty-week scan.’

  ‘Wow,’ he said and then dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘Hello, little FB.’

  She let go of his hand and tried to turn around to see his face but David wanted her to stay where she was. He was waiting for the next kick. ‘What did you just say?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said innocently.

  ‘Yes, you did. You just called our baby FB, didn’t you? What does it stand for?’ She felt him shrug so she pushed back hard against him. ‘Tell me!’

  ‘It’s, erm, silly. It stands for … Fur Ball.’

  ‘We’re having a baby, not a fluffy animal!’

  ‘Really?’ He grinned at her in the mirror. ‘OK, OK, and I know it’s not an obvious comparison, but babies are cute and cuddly too, aren’t they?’

  Even though Jo wasn’t convinced he was telling her the full story, she was simply relieved that he was starting to connect with their unborn child. With a contented smile spreading across her face, she went to place her hand back on top of his, but it wasn’t there. The vision froze until another well-aimed kick from a tiny foot completely shattered the image she had conjured and Jo’s eyes snapped open to face reality. Her forehead was still pressed against the mirror and she was looking down at her hands gripping the washbasin, her knuckles as white as the porcelain. She barely had the strength to lift her gaze and confirm that the en suite was as empty as she feared.

  ‘You were ready to become a father, David. Maybe you still wanted to give me a hard time about it, but you were ready to accept we were having a baby,’ she whispered, painfully aware of the implications of what she was saying. She suddenly felt queasy again. ‘Please don’t be dead, David. Please, I beg you. I know you were scared about being a dad but now I’m terrified that you never will be.’

  Jo’s knees started to buckle as she gave in to the need to sob. Keeping her grip on the washbasin, she went with the fall, hanging her head down between her outstretched arms and letting her tears drip on to the tiled floor. ‘I’ll forgive you anything, David. Anything! Just please, please, please don’t be dead!’

  At some point later, Jo became aware of the dull ache in her knees and her back, and found herself curled up on the bathroom floor. As her surroundings returned to her consciousness, so did the memories of the night before. She unfurled her hand. There was a scab forming on her wound but it was the overwhelming sense of panic she had experienced on her fraught journey home that still felt raw. She could recall the phone calls from her mum and then Irene but no memory of what happened next. She rubbed her fingers together as she tried to work out why they felt so sore. It was only when she detected the faint smell of bleach that she realized it was chemical burning. She knew without a shad
ow of doubt that when she went downstairs, the kitchen would be pristine.

  With no control over David’s whereabouts, Jo was determined to cling on to the few things she did have control over. While she was at home, she had nothing to do except wait but if she could just get through one more day then maybe she would feel strong enough to return to work. If she could make it to her desk then she could at least have part of the day where she could pretend everything was normal still. It was a minor goal but one that gave her the impetus to drag herself up off the floor and get showered and dressed although she was under no illusions; it was going to be another very long day.

  Jo watched her computer flicker into life as she sat in the study preparing to discover what kind of future awaited the wife of a missing person. She already knew David’s employment at Nelson’s was hanging in the balance, but from the list of search results coming up, that would be only the beginning of her problems. The first site she opened provided a wealth of statistics. It didn’t so much give her answers as give her odds, but they provided at least one glimmer of hope and a reason to dismiss the growing fear that David was dead; only a fraction of one per cent of missing persons were found to have died and even though 95 per cent of those were adult males, David didn’t match the other high risk profiles. He didn’t have existing mental health issues and she refused to believe he was suicidal. So in all likelihood David had elected to disappear …

  Pushing back against the chair, Jo put a little more space between herself and the computer screen. Was that hope she felt? Was she seriously wishing that David had left her? Of course it was better than David being dead but a husband abandoning his pregnant wife was not cause for celebration. She spread both hands over the growing mound of taught flesh across her midriff.