Free Separated at Death (The Lakeland Murders) by J J Salkeld Page A

they’d be able to talk without interruption. Would she really want him out of the house that night? Over the years Hall had sat across the table in interview rooms from countless men who had recently left the family home, sometimes because they’d been forced to by the courts, sometimes because they’d agreed with their wives that it was for the best.
     
    But usually it wasn’t for the best, and that was why the husbands ended up under arrest and in bother, often after a drink-fuelled domestic. And until that evening Hall had sympathised with them, but never really empathised. But now he did. Just as having children had changed the way that he saw the world, and himself, for ever, so he started to realise that what was about to happen to him would change it all again. And as he sat there in the artificial gloaming he realised, with absolute certainty, that he wouldn’t be one of those people who manage to bounce back quickly and ‘move on’, as everyone liked to say these days. It was just something that he’d have to live with.
     
    Hall got up, feeling pins and needles in his legs from sitting for so long on his inspector-grade chair, and wondered if John Hamilton was very much the same kind of person.
     
     
     
    Things went much as he’d expected that night, but after twenty one years of marriage he didn’t expect many surprises from Carol, nor she from him. Perhaps that was half the trouble. It had all been remarkably calm, and they’d agreed on how to proceed. They’d tell the kids in the morning, go for a separation and then a no-fault divorce, and split their assets 50/50. But then Carol had surprised him. ‘Why don’t you stay in the house, and the kids stay here with you? I know you work long hours, but they’re plenty big enough to look after themselves until you get home from work. What do you think?’
     
    He said that he agreed wholeheartedly, and added that they should tell the kids straight away, that evening. He didn’t want Carol to have a chance to change her mind.
     
    He’d resisted the urge to address the whole ‘there’s no-one else’ lie when he’d first got home, and now he was delighted that he had: he reckoned that keeping everything so amicable had just helped earn him half his family. Carol had obviously been planning this for some time, and Hall guessed that she and her new lover had no interest in living in Hall’s house, or with his children. They probably had a use in mind for the cash that would come Carol’s way when he bought her out of her share of the house. It would mean taking out a mortgage, and maybe doing a few extra years at work after he’d got his 30 in, but that seemed like the bargain of a lifetime to Hall.
     
    As he lay in bed that night - Carol had gone out when the children had eventually calmed down - he cried, as he had known he would. He would come to realise that the vast fog-bank of grief that he would have to navigate had only just begun to roll over him, but even that night he knew that his situation could have been so much worse. He couldn’t stop his wife from loving someone else, and from not loving him, but he was going to be able to stay with his children. And, try as he might, he couldn’t begin to imagine how Carol could bear to go. But Hall was just grateful that she was going to.
     
    Eventually he slept. In his dream he was back in the little cottage that he and Carol had bought when they first married, and he was trying to carry something up the stairs, though he couldn’t tell exactly what it was. It was heavy, and awkward, with edges that caught the bannister and the walls, and when he woke he was trying to negotiate the narrow return on the staircase. Hall had a strong feeling that he wasn’t going to make it.
     
     
     
     
    Ian Mann had been for a run after work that night, as he usually did, and felt much better for it. When he left the military and joined the police one of the things he missed was the physical