The Widow(17)

Of course, I’d never have let a child of mine play outside on her own. She was only two and a half, for goodness’ sake. Her mum should’ve taken better care of her. Bet she was sat watching Jeremy Kyle or some rubbish like that. It’s always people like that that these things happen to, Glen says. Careless people.

And they said it was Glen who took her. And killed her. I couldn’t breathe when they said it—the police, I mean. They were the first. Others said it later.

We stood there in our front hall with our mouths open. Well, I say we. Glen sort of went blank. His face was blank. He didn’t look like Glen anymore.

The police were quiet when they came. No banging down the door or anything like on the telly. They knocked, rat-tat tat-a-tat-a tat. Glen had only just come in from cleaning the car. He opened the door, and I put my head around the kitchen door to see who it was. It was two blokes, asking to come in. One looked like my geography teacher at school, Mr. Harris. Same tweedy jacket.

“Mr. Glen Taylor?” “Mr. Harris” asked, all quiet and calm.

“Yes,” Glen said, and asked if they were selling something. I couldn’t hear properly at the beginning, but then they came in. They were policemen—Detective Inspector Bob Sparkes and his sergeant, they said.

“Mr. Taylor, I’d like to talk to you about the disappearance of Bella Elliott,” DI Sparkes said. And I opened my mouth to say something, to make the policeman stop saying these things, but I couldn’t. And Glen’s face went blank.

He never looked at me once the whole time. Never put his arm around me or touched my hand. He said later he was in shock. He and the policemen carried on talking, but I can’t remember hearing what they were saying. I watched their mouths moving, but I couldn’t take it in. What had Glen got to do with Bella? He wouldn’t harm a hair on a child’s head. He loved children.

Then they left, Glen and the policemen. Glen told me later that he said good-bye and told me not to worry; it was just a stupid mix-up he’d sort out. But I don’t remember that. Other policemen stayed at the house to ask me questions, to root around in our lives, but through it all, going around and around in my brain, I kept thinking about his face and how I didn’t know him for a second.

He told me later someone had said he’d been making a delivery near where Bella disappeared, but that didn’t mean anything. Just a coincidence, he said. There must’ve been hundreds of people in the area that day.

He’d been nowhere near the scene of the crime—his delivery was miles away, he said. But the police were going through everyone, to check if they saw anything.

He’d started as a delivery driver after he got laid off by the bank. They were looking for redundancies, he told people, and he fancied a change. He’d always dreamed of having the chance to start his own business, be his own boss.

The night I discovered the real reason was a Wednesday. Aerobics and a late supper for us. He shouted at me about why I was later than usual, horrible tight words spat out, angry and dirty. Words he never used normally. Everything was wrong. He was crowding the kitchen with his accusations, his anger. His eyes were dead, as if he didn’t know me either. I thought he was going to hit me; I watched his fists clench and unclench at his sides, me frozen at the cooker, spatula in my hand.

My kitchen, my rules, we used to joke, but not that Wednesday. Wednesday’s child is full of woe.

The row ended with a slammed door as he marched off to bed, to sleep on the sofa bed in the spare room, cut off from me. I remember standing at the foot of the stairs, numb. What was this about? What had happened? I didn’t want to think about what it meant for us.

Stop it, I told myself. It’ll be all right. He must’ve had a bad day. Let him sleep it off.

I started tidying, picking up his scarf and jacket where he’d hung them on the banister and putting them on the coat hooks by the door. I felt something stiff in one pocket, a letter. A white envelope with a see-through panel with his name and our address showing. From the bank. The words were official and as stiff as the envelope: “inquiry,” “unprofessional behavior,” “inappropriate,” and “termination forthwith.” I was lost in the formal language, but I knew this meant disgrace. The end of our dreams. Our future. Clutching the letter in my hand, I ran up the stairs. I marched into the spare room and flicked on the light. He must’ve heard me coming but pretended to be asleep until I heard myself screech: “What is this about?” He looked at me like I was nothing.

“I’ve been fired,” he said, and rolled back over to pretend to sleep.

The next morning Glen came into our bedroom with a cup of tea in my favorite cup. He looked like he’d hardly slept and said he was sorry. He sat down on the bed and said he was under a lot of pressure and it was all a misunderstanding at work and that he’d never got on with the boss. He said he’d been set up and blamed for something. Some mistake, he said. He’d done nothing wrong. His boss was jealous. Glen said he had big plans for his future, but that didn’t matter if I wasn’t beside him.

“You are the center of my world, Jeanie,” he said, and held me close, and I hugged him back and let go of my fear.

Mike, a friend he said he met on the Internet, told him about the driving job—“Just while I work out what business I want to get into, Jeanie,” Glen said. It was cash in hand at first, and then they took him on permanently. He stopped talking about being his own boss.