Human Remains

couldn’t seem to get through to him how serious this was. He was about to leave for work, and until I started to cry and get hysterical he was fully intending to go to work and call me in the evening. But when I broke down he said he would come right away. Then I tried to ring Adrian in Australia, but there was no answer.
    I thought he’d been caught fiddling his taxes. That was my first thought and for a long time after that I didn’t consider any possible alternative. It seemed the most likely problem, and explained why they were concentrating on his office rather than anything else in the house.
    Stephen went to the police station in the afternoon, while I stayed at home to tidy up and clean the house, but he was back soon afterwards. They wouldn’t tell him anything. His father was still being interviewed. He was unlikely to be released before tomorrow morning. I sent Stephen back with a bag containing pyjamas, a dressing gown, his washbag. A clean shirt.
    ‘He’s not staying in a fucking hotel, mother,’ Stephen said.
    ‘I don’t care,’ I replied. ‘And don’t swear at me.’
    He did as he was told, but when he came back he wanted something else. He’d not been allowed to see his father but a request had come through. He needed a suit.
    ‘What for?’ I asked.
    ‘He’s going to the Magistrates’ in the morning,’ Stephen said. ‘He wants to wear a suit. Like it will help.’
    ‘Of course it will help,’ I said. I went upstairs and found his best suit, the tailored one he wore at the board meetings. A new shirt, a silk tie in a deep blue to bring out the colour of his eyes.
    He was charged the next morning with possession of child abuse images. The shock was immense. I think they thought I was in denial – in fact Stephen said as much – but I wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t possible, there was no way such a thing was true. There were very few people I could confide in, but one of them was my sister Janet, who lived about twenty miles away. I went to stay at her house for a few days at Stephen’s insistence. I think he thought the press might get wind of it and he didn’t want them taking pictures of me in the garden, or standing at the window like a lost soul.
    ‘I can’t believe it,’ I said to Janet. I must have said this to her five times already. ‘I just can’t believe any of it’s true. I mean, we still have a good sex life! Surely he wouldn’t…’
    She looked at me over her mug of coffee and let me get it all off my chest. Trouble was, it didn’t help. It made things worse, talking about it, because the disbelief didn’t go away. It was as though somebody had made all this up, just to spite us. I tried to think who could hate us enough to do this, to tear us all apart.
    He got bailed in the end and he came home, but by that time the press had worked out who he was and what he was charged with, and there were TV camera vans parked at the bottom of the driveway.
    We moved out. Leonard wasn’t allowed out of the country so we had to cancel our holiday that had been booked and paid for. Our insurance didn’t cover the loss; apparently being arrested, even for something you haven’t done, doesn’t qualify as being enough of a disaster to warrant a payout. He tried to insist I should go without him, but I could not. What if they came again, and took him away without me knowing? And besides, if the worst should happen – I wanted to spend every moment I could with him.
    He tried so hard to act as though nothing was wrong. We tried to live a normal life, in the little house owned by friends of ours who were living overseas. Only close family knew where we were, and of course the police. Leonard only left the house once a week to sign his bail document at the police station. When he came out again we drove for miles and miles to make sure we weren’t followed back to the house.
    Eventually the press moved on to other matters, but I was still too afraid to go home.
    My sister Janet asked me what he’d had to say about it all, what his excuse was. In truth I never talked to him about it. I never even asked him if he was guilty of the crimes he had been accused of, such was my faith in him. He was my husband and I’d vowed to stand by him no matter what, for better, for worse, and this was about as ‘worse’ as it was possible to get. So I made the decision that he was innocent, that it was a mistake, or someone else’s malicious accusation, that had caused all