‘I promise you it’s not something I’ve made a habit of doing. You have to believe me.’
His words were met with a silence. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘we’re both tired. After a good night’s sleep, we can talk about this in the morning and—’
That was when he realised Valentina wasn’t at the other end of the line anymore. Thinking the signal must have cut out, he rang her again, only to get her voicemail. He didn’t leave a message. There was nothing he felt able to say. Better to wait until he was home.
With a bolt of adrenaline-pumping shock, he snapped his eyes open. How long had they been closed? One second? Ten seconds? More?
He opened the car window and gulped in the cool night air. Next he switched on the radio, then changed his mind and found his old friend Stan Getz on the music system. After a few minutes, and deciding he was wide awake now, he closed the window, the better to hear the exquisite tone of the saxophone playing.
Orla had never shared his love of jazz, and had often teased him for his ‘old man’ taste in music. He had taken her to Ronnie Scott’s on a date not long after they’d met, and it had amused her greatly to see how absorbed he became in the music.
‘I might as well not be here,’ she’d said, leaning in close and running a finger across his lower lip. As seductive moves went, it had the desired effect on him. They’d got happily drunk and later tumbled into a cab and, back at his student digs, they had enjoyed breathless and unprotected sex.
‘If I’m pregnant now,’ she’d said in the morning, ‘you’ll just have to do the decent thing and marry me.’
‘I’ll marry you even if you’re not pregnant,’ he’d happily declared.
‘I may hold you to that.’
‘Do!’
Funny, he thought now, that after all this time, and after everything that had happened, he should think of a good memory associated with Orla. And there had been so many good times, it was just that they had been eclipsed by the darkness that had slowly but surely obscured Orla’s world.
Laura’s words at the Wherryman that afternoon came back to him about choosing what we want to remember. He saw now that she was right and that the mind was capable of doing all sorts of strange things.
Had his played a trick on him, he wondered, thinking of Valentina. What if it had all been an illusion? A trick of the heart, as well as the mind?
If so, how had he been taken in? He liked to think that he was not a stupid man – that he was actually gifted with an above-average level of intelligence – yet somehow, through believing himself to be in love, he had managed to destroy everything that had mattered to him – the love and respect of his friends, and now the future he had imagined.
Believing himself to be in love …
The significance of what he’d just said hit him so forcibly he could have wept. He saw now that he should have listened to his friends. But he hadn’t wanted to. He’d wanted so much to believe in Valentina and everything she represented. But none of it had been real. His behaviour had been that of a desperate man, clinging to the foolish hope he knew what he was doing.
How he wished now that he had never left Linston End and set himself on this disastrous path. A path that had led to Sorrel breaking her promise, and jeopardising her marriage to Simon. Poor Simon, how would he recover from this? Would he ever speak to Alastair again? Would Rachel and Callum?
He was just thinking of Callum’s understandable rage that afternoon, when from nowhere he felt an explosive thud that ripped through him. The sound of metal crunching and glass splintering filled his ears, and then he was being repeatedly and violently hurled against something hard.
Not knowing if time had stood still, or if minutes, or hours had passed, he struggled to make sense of what had happened. But when he tried to move, he found he couldn’t, he was pinned against something, and he couldn’t feel his arms and legs.
He gave up trying to move, vaguely aware that the world – having seemingly spun off its axis – had now gone black and eerily quiet. It was then that he realised he was barely able to breathe, that his chest felt crushed. Was he suffocating?
Or was he drowning?
Was this how Orla had felt when she was drowning? Had her lungs overridden her desire to end her life and fought desperately for a life-saving breath?
Alastair!
How strange. Somebody was calling to him. He strained to hear who it was. The voice was too far away for him to make it out though. Or had he imagined it?
He forced air into his lungs, and heard a strange bubbling sound like a drain emptying, followed by a wave of agonising pain. He cried out, but that just made the pain worse. He was conscious now of his throat constricting and liquid filling his mouth. Blood. It tasted of salt and metal, and was now seeping out through his lips.
Alastair!
There it was again. And he knew that voice. Knew it with every fibre of his being. It was Orla.
What was she doing here?
But then where was he?
