Page 36 of The World Outside My Window

She hesitates. What Carol told her about the photos on the keyring has rattled her, and she still hasn’t worked out what it could mean. She’s not sure if she wants to share it with anyone else, in case it makes it feel more sinister. But if she doesn’t, what’s the point of doing this in the first place?

‘I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation,’ Ben says carefully as she finishes explaining what Carol claimed to have seen.

‘That’s what my best friend, Debbie, said. She says we need to take it with a pinch of salt.’

‘But you think there’s something in it?’

She sighs. ‘I really don’t know. I hope there isn’t, and that Debbie’s right. But I’m scared this is just the tiny tip of an enormous iceberg, and if I start looking into that then I might find even more stuff that I don’t want to know.’ It isn’t until she’s said the words out loud that she realises they’re true. What if Carol was right, and Jim did have photos of children on a keyring that he didn’t mean her to see? What would be the implications for them? She looks at Ben, who seems deep in thought.

‘You know Jim better than I do. Obviously,’ he says eventually. ‘But I just don’t see it. I mean, I just can’t see that he’d have any sinister secrets.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She does know that. At least, she always has done. But there’s a small but growing part of her that can’t help wondering whether it might meansomething. Whether there might be some connection between the photos on Jim’s keyring and the person who used to hang around her flat in London, or the silent phone calls she used to receive, or even the fact that she doesn’t really know anything about her husband’s life when he’s away from her. Her head feels muddled and she pushes the thoughts away.

The room has brightened, and outside the window the rain has eased a little, the hammering becoming more of a gentle tap. Ben is suddenly struck by the idea that he needs to get out of there. Jim might not have told him anything about Laura, but Ben definitely told Jim about himself, and he has no idea how much, if anything, Laura knows about it. He really doesn’t feel like talking about it, not right now. He needs to go.

He stands suddenly and Laura jumps.

‘Are you going?’

‘Yes, sorry. I was – I’ve got to get some work done and – well, the rain’s stopping so…’ He trails off, aware he’s being rude. His shoulders slump. ‘Sorry, Laura. I will have a think, and I’ll let you know if I remember anything, okay?’

‘Okay. Thank you.’

‘Right, thanks for the coffee. I’ll see myself out.’ Then he leaves the room and a few seconds later closes the door firmly behind him.

As he hurries home he tries to process everything he’s just learned. His friend has disappeared, and either he really doesn’t want to be found or someone is making sure he isn’t found. Neither of those suggestions sound good. And Jim’s wife, Laura. Well, at least he knows what’s wrong with her now. It isn’t what he expected, but it is awful. But worst of all, worse than any of this, is that Laura has stirred something in him. She’s weak and vulnerable and trying to find her missing husband, and he was attracted to her. What kind of man does that make him?

Trying to block out all thoughts of the morning he’s just had, he turns away from his house, ups his pace and runs until his lungs burn and his legs are close to collapse. Only then can he forget.

* * *

It has been two and a half years. Two and a half long years that Ben has been on his own. For the first six months people were sympathetic. They’d ask him how he felt, bring beers round, invite him for nights out. But that seemed to be the official limit on grief. Some unexplained deadline he never received the memo for. It seemed that, six months after watching your wife die from ovarian cancer, you were supposed to be starting to feel better. To be ‘getting over it’ and ‘starting to move on’. Except he didn’t feel like doing any of those things, and he stubbornly continued to grieve. Slowly, his friends stopped ringing or calling round to see if he wanted to go out. Invitations dried up. And even the people he did see stopped treating him with kid gloves and started pretending nothing had happened. Life, for them, went on.

But not for him it didn’t. Not by a long shot.

Helen’s death broke him, and he still can’t see any way of getting fixed. Whenever he thinks about her, about them, he tries to picture when they first met, or when they bought their first flat together, or when they got married. He forces the image to the front of his mind and tries to hold it there. Usually he succeeds. But sometimes the darker memories creep in, worming their way round the edges of the barrier he’s constructed in his mind, and he can only think of her at the end. Images of his precious, beautiful Helen in bed; in pain, her hair long gone, exhaustion written across her skeletal face. She tried so hard to stay upbeat, to keep a smile on her face. But in the end, it got her. She was beaten.

And so was he.

Their home holds so many memories that at first he could hardly bear to be in it. He’d drift around it like a ghost, from room to room, the memories of Helen so painful it was like being stabbed in the heart. He thought he would have to move, to get away from the place where his heart had been broken, make a fresh start. But slowly he began to realise that he didn’t want to leave. He wanted to live through this pain, because it meant he’d loved her as much as he’d always believed, as if this were proving it, showing the world he had meant every word.

And to his amazement, slowly, slowly, being in the house became a little less painful. When he walked into the bedroom where he’d nursed her for the last few weeks, he stopped seeing the equipment used to administer her pain relief, the piles of pills on the bedside table, the cardboard bowl in case she needed to be sick, the crumpled, sweaty sheets. Instead he started remembering better days, happier days. The day they first moved in, with hardly a stick of furniture to their names except a bed, a wardrobe and a couple of ancient dining-room chairs after years of living in furnished accommodation. They’d eaten beans on toast by the light of the bare bulb swinging from the living-room ceiling rose and drunk red wine until their mouths were a deep shade of purple and their words were slurred. Helen had danced in front of the bedroom window in her bra and knickers, laughing hysterically. ‘Come away from there, we’ve got no curtains, the neighbours will see everything!’ he’d said, giggling along with her. But she hadn’t cared and had carried on dancing, head thrown back, arms in the air, until he’d pulled her onto the unmade mattress and they’d christened their new home.

He thought of the Christmases they’d spent there, her obsession with wrestling the biggest tree they could find into the living room so that it bent over at the top; the dinner parties they’d thrown, the room they’d planned to turn into a nursery one day but had run out of time until that became an impossibility.

So he’d stayed, and here he still is, almost three years later, living alone, working all the hours he can from his office round the corner, and hardly seeing anyone apart from a few friends in the village from time to time. And Jim, of course. He was pleased when Jim moved in. A new friend, someone to enjoy a drink and a chat with, as well as the odd game of poker. He told Jim all about Helen, about the last few years. He didn’t realise until now that it was completely one-sided, and that Jim hardly revealed anything about himself or Laura, or the reason they’d moved here in the first place.

He wonders whether that was his fault for never asking.

Maybe it’s a sign of his heart finally beginning to heal that he can even think about someone else’s needs, or maybe it’s something else, but he finds that he really wants to help Laura. He must be able to think of something that could give her a clue about what’s happened to Jim. He thinks back to the nights he’s spent with Jim, the games of poker they’ve played, the things Jimhastold him. He tries to dredge up something, anything, even a tiny crumb of detail that might help in any small way. He thinks about what Laura told him about the keyring, and wracks his brain for something that might shed some light on it.Couldit be significant? Could it really be a clue as to Jim’s whereabouts? He just can’t see how.

His lungs are starting to burn and he slows his pace as he completes his circuit, and the end of Willow Crescent is in sight. He slows to a walk as he passes the corner shop, and by the time he gets back to his front door he’s sweaty and exhausted. His watch reveals he’s run at a much faster pace than usual, and he wonders what he was running away from. His inappropriate feelings for Jim’s wife perhaps? He shakes the thought from his head.

It's not until he’s letting himself in his front door that something occurs to him. It was something and nothing, and he probably would never have remembered it if he hadn’t spoken to Laura today. But now it sits there, in his memory, shining like a diamond, and he examines it from all angles to see if it’s something he should tell Laura. Whether it could be useful in tracking Jim down, or whether it would just upset or confuse her more.

A month or so ago, during one of their poker nights, they all drank more than normal, him, Jim, Simon and a couple of the others, and they gave up pretending to play cards. Ben could hardly see what he was holding in front of him, so the memory is fuzzy round the edges. But he remembers Jim talking, telling him about his wife, and he remembers something that jarred at the time, only he couldn’t have said why. It’s only now he’s met Laura that it’s slotted into place. He called his wife something else. Another name. what was it? He sifts through the debris of his mind to find it. Cheryl? No, not that. Kerry? No, more unusual. It’s the only reason he remembers it, because it wasn’t a common name, and he recalls noticing it at the time. He can’t quite grasp it now, but the actual name isn’t important. What is important is whether he should tell Laura about it. Jim denied it at the time, and in his drunken state Ben accepted his denial. Even now, looking back, he can’t be 100 per cent certain he didn’t imagine it.

But he should tell Laura. He should. No matter whether it’s significant to her investigation, he owes it to her to tell her what he (half) remembers, in case the half-remembered name means something to her. After all, it could just be someone from the family, someone she recognises, and she can laugh it off.

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