The Wife Who Ran Away Read online

  Ned hates old movies, by which he means anything that’s out on DVD.

  The kid tilts his head up to study the high frescoes, red-gold hair spilling across his collar. ‘Vertigo for me.’

  I sigh. ‘Yes, I do love that one too . . .’

  ‘No talking!’ the museum guard yells again. ‘No pictures!’

  The next hour passes quickly – we leave the Sistine Chapel to tour the remaining rooms and then wind up stopping for an espresso at the museum café. I’m surprised at quite how much I’m enjoying myself. Despite – or perhaps because of – the age gap between us, I’m energized by the conversation. I hadn’t realized until today how much I miss my own children’s company.

  Molly impulsively flings her arms round me as they get up to leave. ‘Thank you so much, Kate. Today has been lovely.’

  I hug her back, touched. ‘Honestly, it was my pleasure. Thank you for putting up with me for so long.’

  ‘Look,’ Molly says, ‘I don’t know if you like opera, but there’s a production of Carmina Burana in San Galgano next Friday at the ruined abbey. We thought we’d drive up – it’s only a couple of hours away. Maybe you’d like to come along? You could bring, like, your husband or someone . . .’

  My stomach twists in sudden panic at the thought of Ned.

  ‘It’s really sweet of you, but I won’t be here,’ I say quickly. ‘I have to get back home to my family.’

  ‘Give her our number,’ Molly urges her boyfriend. ‘In case you change your mind,’ she tells me.

  I hand Keir my iPhone, watching as he taps in a number, fumbling, knowing I’ll never call it.

  ‘Thanks again for today,’ he says, returning the phone. ‘You were cool.’

  You were cool. Agness and Guy will never believe it.

  My smile fades. I won’t be sharing this story with them. They aren’t going to want to know how much fun I had after I ran out on them.

  Given what I’ve done, they may not want to know me at all.

  Ned

  The husband is always the prime suspect. I get that. They have to look at the husband first. Of course I haven’t bloody done anything to my wife, but as soon as they start digging, they’ll find out how much money I owe the bookies. Kate has a massive life insurance policy; she’s always said she needed it, given our financial responsibilities. Two mortgages, Eleanor’s and ours, and the kids’ private school fees, for a start. I’m innocent, but how’s it going to look?

  I should have clued in when the cop shop phoned at the crack of dawn and asked me to come down to the station to ‘help further with their inquiry’. It’s what they always say when they nick some poor bastard, isn’t it? ‘Dr Crippen is helping with our inquiries.’ Never bloody occurred to me I was in the frame for something. That’s the trouble when you’re innocent. You let your guard down.

  Funny. I’ve seen a thousand cop shows on TV, but nothing quite prepares you for the reality of starring in one.

  I’m shown into a very different sort of interview room from yesterday. No cosy sofas and boxes of tissues this time. There’s worn lino on the floor instead of carpeting, and a two-way mirror where the pot plants should’ve been. They leave me to stew on my own for a good forty minutes, while I picture being banged up and buggered by some Kray wannabe. Finally the door opens and a cop strolls into the room without glancing up from the open folder in his hand. Mid-forties, fit, no more than average height but with an air of authority about him. Clearly a lot more senior than Plod yesterday. There’s no smirking now. Suddenly everything is deadly serious.

  ‘Have you found her?’ I blurt, half-rising from my seat.

  ‘Not yet, Mr Forrest.’ He pulls out the chair opposite me and puts the folder down on the table between us. ‘DCI Wooding. We were rather hoping you could help us with that.’

  I stare at him. ‘I’ve told you everything I know. I haven’t seen her since Monday. No one has. I told you all this yesterday.’

  ‘I’m aware what you told my colleague yesterday, yes.’

  ‘So why’ve you brought me back here? Have you found something, or what?’

  ‘What sort of something might you expect us to find, Mr Forrest?’

  ‘Christ, I don’t bloody know!’ I rub my face with both hands, wishing I’d taken the time to shave. ‘Look,’ I say, trying to sound calm, ‘I’ve been up all night imagining the worst. If you’ve found Kate’s . . . if you’ve found Kate, I’d rather know. Whatever’s happened, I’d rather know.’

  ‘We haven’t found anything, Mr Forrest. Frankly, we’re as confused as you are.’

  I wish he’d stop being so fucking polite.

  ‘My wife isn’t the sort of woman to just disappear,’ I insist, leaning forward in my chair. ‘She’s not like that. She’s got a good job, she loves our kids. She’d never walk out without a word. Something must have happened to her.’

  ‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ Wooding says with infuriating calmness.

  ‘I understand you have to consider all the options,’ I say reasonably. ‘I get that. I know you have to look at me as a suspect. But all the time you’re doing that, you’re not out looking for her. I haven’t hurt my wife. I love her. She could be out there, in trouble, while you’re wasting time with me.’

  ‘I can assure you, we’re doing everything we can to find her. Now, if we could go over the events leading up to her disappearance one more time . . .’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ I cry, losing my patience. ‘I’ve told you, you’re wasting time! You should be out there looking for her!’

  Wooding refuses to be defected. Slowly, he goes over everything I’ve already told them, asking the same questions again and again. Eventually, after nearly an hour of this, he closes the folder.

  ‘Come on, Mr Forrest,’ he says kindly. ‘We’re not unsympathetic here. We all know how things can escalate. Before you know it – well, we do understand.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  He pushes back his chair and comes round to my side of the table, perching on one corner in a familiar fashion. ‘What was it? A row that got out of hand? It happens. You tell us your side of the story now, we’ll work with you. Where’s Kate, Mr Forrest?’

  ‘Look,’ I say, through gritted teeth. ‘I’ve told you, I have no idea where she is. That’s why I came to you, remember?’

  His face hardens. ‘Yes, but you didn’t quite tell us everything, did you?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Wooding reaches behind him for the folder and pulls out a sheaf of paper. ‘Shall we talk about this?’

  I take the paperwork, unable to stop my hand from shaking. It’s all there: the debt to the bookies, the second mortgage with Kate’s falsified signature, the loans, the credit card debts.

  The life insurance policy.

  I swallow. ‘How did you get this?’

  ‘The usual channels. Is there anything you’d like to add to your previous statement, Mr Forrest?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with what’s happened to Kate!’ I fling the pages on the table. ‘Look, perhaps I haven’t been the best husband in the world. I’m crap with money, but so what? It doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife! I’d never do anything to hurt her!’

  ‘Your wife knew all about your debts, did she, sir?’

  ‘No, not all of them. Do you tell your wife everything?’

  Wooding holds my gaze for a long moment, then returns to his chair on the other side of the desk.

  ‘Is there anywhere you think she could be, Mr Forrest? Anywhere she could have gone?’

  I bury my head in my hands. I can’t think of a happy explanation for Kate’s disappearance. I keep picturing her dead in a ditch somewhere, or decomposing in a shallow grave. Maggots, rigor mortis, blunt head trauma. Rape. Ever since yesterday, I’ve been praying for something simple like a car accident: a minor head injury, amnesia. Or a nervous breakdown. Another man, even – I don’t care. Just as long as she’s OK. Christ.
I never thought I’d find myself viewing an affair as the lesser of two evils.

  The door opens again and a young cop beckons Wooding over. The two of them exchange muted whispers and then Wooding returns.

  ‘It seems we’ve found something,’ he says.

  I feel sick.

  ‘Your wife would appear to be perfectly fine.’ A beat. ‘We’ve managed to trace a transaction on her credit card. Was your wife planning a trip at all, Mr Forrest?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It seems she purchased a ticket to Rome on Monday afternoon. She also withdrew two thousand pounds in euros from a bank at Heathrow. You had no idea she was going away?’

  ‘No, of course I bloody didn’t!’ I shout.

  ‘We’ve checked the CCTV cameras at the bank. There’s no doubt it’s your wife, Mr Forrest. From what we can tell, she was travelling alone. There were no signs of duress.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say blankly. ‘Why would she be going to Rome? Why wouldn’t she tell me?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. But it would seem this is no longer a Missing Persons case.’

  ‘Why would she do something like this? Why would she leave without saying a word? Everything was fine between us! I don’t understand . . .’

  And then finally, finally, I do.

  Four months before

  Kate

  ‘You can’t be,’ Ned says when I tell him. ‘You’re nearly forty, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Ned,’ I protest, half laughing. ‘You make it sound like I’ve got one foot in the grave. Thirty-nine is nothing these days.’

  ‘You’ll be forty in a few months.’

  ‘Cherie Blair had a baby at forty-five. Kelly Preston was forty-eight when she had her last baby. I’m a spring chicken in comparison.’

  Ned’s shock is so absolute, I laugh again. Wanting to be quite sure before I raised his hopes, I’ve hugged this incredible secret to myself for three whole weeks, long enough for the surprise to wear off and the joy to sink in. A baby was the last thing I was expecting, the very last thing I’d thought I wanted, and yet joy is the only word to describe what I feel.

  He shakes his head as if to clear it. ‘But I thought you couldn’t – all those years after Agness was born, when we tried for another baby . . .’

  Suddenly I’m very busy with the kettle. No need to tell him now that I was on the Pill the entire time we were ‘trying’; or that I came off it when I turned thirty-five, anxious about clots and strokes, and replaced it with the Mirena coil, which was supposed to last five years. Clearly it came up a month or two short.

  Ned rubs his hands across his face. ‘Are you sure? How do you know?’

  ‘I’ve done two home tests and both were positive. I’ve been feeling tired, and my breasts are tender . . .’

  ‘Those home kits aren’t reliable,’ Ned interrupts. ‘You can get false positives, especially at your age.’

  ‘Would you stop going on about my age,’ I say, nettled.

  ‘You can’t be pregnant,’ he says again. ‘You must’ve made a mistake.’

  For the first time, I start to feel nervous. This isn’t how I thought this conversation would go.

  Fifteen years ago, when I fell pregnant with Agness, Ned didn’t take it well. He’d wanted to wait a bit, give our new family time to get to know each other before adding the complication of another baby. I hadn’t been particularly thrilled by the timing either; the prospect of a second child, when I’d barely got used to parenting the first, filled me with dread. Besides, at that stage, I’d only been at Forde’s a couple of months; the last thing I’d needed was to take time off to have a baby.

  But a termination was out of the question. Ned had been educated by nuns, and you can take the boy out of the convent school, but you can’t take the convent school out of the boy. I had no such religious constraints, but discarding a healthy baby merely because it was inconvenient timing had seemed too much like tempting Fate. What if I could never have another child? What if this was it?

  What I’d needed then, for the first time in our relationship, was Ned’s support and reassurance. But he responded in what I soon learned was his usual fashion: by burying his head in the sand and ignoring what he didn’t like. I found myself a de facto single mother, attending doctor’s appointments and prenatal classes on my own. Ned refused to discuss childcare arrangements or which room to use as a nursery. When I tried to show him the fuzzy black-and-white scan photos, he walked away. What should have been one of the happiest times of my life became the most miserable.

  Two weeks before my due date, Ned accepted an assignment to the news bureau in Belfast, filling in for one of his colleagues who was, ironically, on paternity leave. I had no idea whether my husband was even planning to be home for the birth, and such was the froideur between us by this stage that I couldn’t ask.

  ‘If you don’t like it, leave him,’ Eleanor said briskly when I finally swallowed my pride and broached the subject to my mother. ‘You haven’t even been married two years. Do you think things are going to get better as the honeymoon shine wears off?’

  Ned’s own mother was equally appalled when she found out. ‘I’ll speak to him,’ she said grimly. ‘The divorce wasn’t all Liesl’s fault, you know.’

  Humiliating though it was to have my mother-in-law intervene, by this stage I was desperate. When Ned rang and said he was coming home, I didn’t care that he was doing it for his mother, not me; I was just grateful he was coming at all. As it was, he nearly missed Agness’s birth. I was crossing my legs and cursing him in three languages by the time he finally showed up at the hospital with a hangdog expression, a wilting bunch of garage flowers and a cheap stuffed rabbit that went straight in the bin.

  But the moment he saw his newborn daughter, red-faced and Churchillian, he had eyes for no one else. Cradling her head in his palm, her tiny body stretched along the length of his forearm, he gazed at her as if the rest of the world no longer existed.

  My relief was intense. I’d been terrified he wouldn’t bond with her; that his rejection of the baby would continue after her birth. I couldn’t have borne it if history had repeated itself and her father had rebuffed her the way my father had rebuffed me.

  But the intensity of his devotion to Agness soon became disconcerting. Naturally it didn’t take the form of practical help – it was too much to ask for him to actually change a nappy or do the midnight feed – but he spent every free moment, of which he had rather too many nowadays, with his daughter. He bought so many ridiculous plush animals that the nursery resembled the toy department at Harrods. One evening he came home with a plastic bag filled with hundreds of ten- and twenty-pound notes he’d won on a race at Newmarket.

  ‘For her college fund,’ he’d said, counting it onto the table.

  She wasn’t even six months old when he started lobbying for another child. A playmate for Agness, he said fondly. I pointed out that she already had a playmate: Guy.

  ‘She needs a proper brother or sister,’ Ned insisted. ‘A real family.’

  ‘Guy is a proper brother!’ I protested.

  Ned shrugged. ‘You know what I mean.’

  I didn’t want another child. As far as I was concerned, we already were a real family, and two children under three was quite enough. I was still winning back ground my maternity leave had cost me and had no intention of scuppering my career for good with a repeat performance.

  Quietly, I went on the Pill. I’d trusted Ned with condoms before, and look where that had got us.

  Every month, when Ned saw the box of Tampax on top of the lavatory cistern, he’d sulk for days, as if he were the one with PMT. After five or six months, he started wondering aloud if I should get ‘checked out’, clearly assuming that if there was a problem, it couldn’t be with him.

  I explained, yet again, why I didn’t want another baby. In his usual fashion, Ned listened to me and then brushed everything I’d just said under the carpet.

  ‘Maybe
this time one of my swimmers will make it through,’ he’d quip jovially every time we made love. ‘At least we know from Agness I’m not firing blanks.’

  Whenever we visited friends with small children, he’d spend the next few days talking about how nice it’d be if ‘the stork paid us a visit’ before it was too late.

  Which is why, when I found myself pregnant just before Christmas, I thought he’d be pleased.

  ‘Ned,’ I say, ‘I know it’s hard to believe, but it’s not a mistake. My period is more than a month late, and you know how regular I’ve always been. I thought at first it was my age, same as you. I assumed it was the start of the menopause, but—’

  ‘The menopause! Well, of course! That’d certainly put your hormones out of whack.’ Suddenly he smiles and holds out his arms. ‘Come here, darling. Put that kettle down. You poor old thing. No wonder you’ve been looking so peaky.’

  There’s no mistaking the relief in his voice. A chill ripples down my spine. ‘Ned, are you listening to me?’ I exclaim, pulling away. ‘I’m looking peaky because I’m pregnant.’

  He stares at me for a long moment and then bluntly turns away from me.

  I gaze at his rigid back in disbelief. For years he’s wanted another child, company for his precious Agness. I’ve tortured myself endlessly over denying him, and now, when I least expected it, nature finds her own way. A last-chance baby. A new beginning. The opportunity to get my mothering right, to make the right choice and put my family first. Now Ned’s telling me he doesn’t want it after all?

  ‘Ned,’ I say tentatively. ‘Ned, I thought you’d be pleased.’

  He whirls round. ‘Pleased?’

  ‘But you always wanted another baby . . .’

  ‘When Agness needed a playmate! When we were still young! Not now! Christ Almighty, Kate! I’m forty-three! I’ll be over sixty by the time this kid leaves school!’ His face is white, stricken. ‘Do you have any idea what a new baby means? Back to the sleepless nights, the endless fucking nappies, the two of us wrung out like wet dishcloths!’