The Widow(75)

“When did you first hear about Bella Elliott going missing, Jean?”

I’m all right on this. I think back to the day in October 2006, when the story came over the radio as I stood in the kitchen.

“I’d been working that morning,” I tell Kate. “But I’d had the afternoon off for working the Sunday morning shift. I’d just been puttering around, tidying, peeling potatoes for supper. Glen came home for a quick cuppa, and I got ready for my class at the sports center. I’d just got back and was putting the oven on when the news came on the radio. They said there was a massive police search for a little girl who’d gone missing in Southampton. A little girl who’d disappeared out of her garden. I felt really cold and shivery, a little girl like that, still a baby really. Didn’t bear thinking about.”

I feel cold again now. It was a shock to be confronted with that little face, the eye patch and the curls. Kate is looking anxious, so I start talking again.

“The papers the next day were full of it. Lots of pictures and some quotes from her grandma about how sweet she was. Heartbreaking really. We all talked about it in the salon. Everyone was upset and interested—you know how people are.”

“And Glen?” Kate asks. “What was his reaction?”

“He was shocked about it. He’d been making a delivery in Hampshire that day—of course, you know that—and he couldn’t get over it. We both loved children. We were upset.”

The truth is, we didn’t have much of a conversation about the disappearance beyond what a coincidence it was that he’d been in Hampshire. We had our tea on our laps, while he watched the news on the telly, and then he went back upstairs to his computer. I remember I said: “I hope they find that little girl Bella.” And I can’t remember him saying much else. I didn’t think it was odd at the time—it was just Glen being Glen.

“And then the police came,” Kate says, leaning forward over her notebook and looking at me intently. “That must’ve been terrible.”

I give her the story about me being too shocked to speak and still standing in the hall an hour after the police left, like a statue.

“Did you have any doubts about him being involved, Jean?” she asks. I swallow a mouthful of coffee and shake my head. I was waiting for her to ask this—it was what the police asked me over and over again—and I’d prepared my answer. “How could I believe he would be involved in something as awful as that?” I say. “He loved children. We both did.”

But not in the same way, it turned out.

Kate is looking at me, and I suppose I’ve gone quiet again. “Jean,” she says, “what are you thinking?” I want to say I’m thinking about when Glen told me he had seen Bella, but I can’t tell her that. That’s too big to say.

“Just about things,” I say. And then I add: “About Glen and whether I knew him at all.”

“How do you mean, Jean?” she asks, and I tell her about Glen’s face that day he was arrested.

“His face went blank,” I say. “I didn’t recognize him for a few seconds. It frightened me.”

She writes it down, glancing up to nod and look me in the eye. She lets me talk as the stuff about the porn spills out. She sits, writing quickly in her notebook but never taking her eyes off me. Nodding, egging me on with her eyes, all sympathy and understanding. For years I accepted the blame for what Glen did, telling myself it was my sick obsession with having a baby that made him do terrible things, but today he’s not here to give me that look. I can be angry and hurt by what he did in our spare room. While I was lying in bed just across the way, he invited that filth into our house.

“What kind of man looks at pictures like that, Kate?” I ask her. She shrugs helplessly. Her old man doesn’t look at toddlers being abused. Lucky her.

“He told me it wasn’t real. That it was women dressed up as children, but it wasn’t. Not all of it, anyway. The police said it was real. Glen said it was an addiction. He couldn’t help himself. It started with ‘normal porn,’ he said. I’m not sure what normal is. Are you?”

She shakes her head again. “No, Jean, I’m not sure. Naked women, I suppose.”

I nod; that’s what I thought. The sort of stuff you get in magazines or in adult-rated films.

“But this wasn’t normal. He said he kept on finding new things to look at; he couldn’t help himself. He said he found stuff by accident, but that isn’t possible, is it?”

She shrugs, then shakes her head.

“You have to pay,” I tell her. “You have to put your credit card number in, your name and address. Everything. You can’t just stumble onto one of these websites. It’s a deliberate act, which takes time and concentration—that’s what the police witness said at his trial. And my Glen did that night after night, searching for worse and worse things. New pictures and videos, hundreds of them, the police said. Hundreds! You wouldn’t think there were that many to look at. He told me he hated looking at them, but something in him made him look for more. He said it was a sickness. He couldn’t help himself. And he blamed me.”

Kate looks at me, willing me to go on, and I can’t stop now. “He said I drove him to it. But he betrayed me. He pretended to be a normal man, going to work, having a beer with his mates, and helping with the washing up, but he turned into a monster in our spare room each night. He wasn’t Glen anymore. He was sick, not me. If he could do that, I believe he was capable of anything.”