Darren and I shared similar almond-shaped eyes, hairstyle and facial bone structure. A cursory glance at his passport’s photograph confirmed that. As long as I avoided a razor for a couple of weeks, I’d match his light beard and gain the potential to explore wherever I liked.
The moral issues raised by assuming the identity of a man who’d yet to be laid out on a mortician’s slab were complex – so I put them aside. No other issues presented themselves, especially as I alone knew that Darren had lost his wallet in Algeria. Without his passport, there would be no speedy way of tracking down his relatives.
I told the police his Christian name and his nationality and left them to fill in the blanks. It would buy me time. I stubbed out my cigarette and returned to the building to watch in respectful silence as his body was stretchered away.
Darren and I were both freer from those who’d held us back than we’d ever been before.
Northampton, today
9.50 a.m.
‘When did I ever hold you back?’ Catherine roared. ‘How dare you! I did nothing but support you and encourage you. I believed in you!’
As each new revelation fell from his lips, her mood darkened, shade by shade, until all she saw was black. She questioned whether the man sitting before her was indeed the same one who’d promised to love her until death do they part so long ago. It looked like him; it sounded like him. Even his mannerisms remained, like the way he absent-mindedly scratched the print of his thumb with his middle finger. Or when he tapped his bottom lip to mask his anxiety.
But she heard no one she recognised in his recollections of his life after discarding his family. Had it really been in him all along to live without a conscience? How could she have failed to recognise such deplorable deceit and opportunism in him? Her love really had been blind.
‘And you stole a dead man’s passport?’ she continued, perplexed. ‘That’s deplorable.’
He shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, like the devil was poking him with a pitchfork. ‘It’s not something I’m proud of, but I did what I had to do. I had no choice.’
She drew deeply from a reservoir of anger. ‘Oh, here we go again with those bloody words. You had no choice. Please, spare me. It was the children and I who had no choice, no choice but to carry on trying to live without you. No choice but to do all we could to try and find you.’
‘In all honesty, I didn’t expect you to be so persistent. I hoped you’d give up after a few weeks.’
‘But that’s what love is, Simon. It’s never giving up on the person you’ve given your heart to. It’s having faith that no matter how tough things get, that person will always be looking for you.’
She shook her head at her own stupidity in dedicating so much time trying to find a man who’d long left the country. They stared at each other until she stopped waiting for him to defend himself. Her victory felt hollow.
He wasn’t ready to explain in full why he, her husband, the stranger, had suddenly elbowed his way back into her life. It wasn’t a revelation he could suddenly blurt out or casually slip into the conversation. He had to make clear to her why he had made his choices before he could reveal the role she’d played in pushing him away.
Only then, when she realised her culpability, could he drop the first of his bombshells. Otherwise all she would hear when it detonated was the deafening sound of the truth ricocheting around the room. She would not pause to reflect, and his appearance would be over as quickly as it began.
For her part, his refusal to answer even her most basic of questions frustrated her. She deserved to know the truth – all of the truth. But against her better judgement, she also had a growing curiosity as to just how he’d filled his ocean of time.
She hoped he’d lived a miserable, depressing existence filled with regret, longing and woe. But none of that was evident in the suntanned, healthy-looking man who’d invaded her home. And all she’d heard so far were his thinly disguised boasts of a much better life abroad – without her.
He rose to his feet and made his way over to the French doors in the dining room to look over the garden he’d once toiled to shape. The corners of his mouth rose when he spotted the patio where they’d spent many long evenings planning their future. He hadn’t thought about those nights in years, and for a moment, he acknowledged there had been good times after all.
She’d since had a brick barbecue built and a wooden pagoda erected, where bright green grapevines hung. He knew from experience they’d never make a decent wine. A child’s yellow plastic bike was propped up against a crab-apple tree he’d planted in the corner by the firs. He wondered where and who the bike’s owner was.
‘I am glad you kept our house,’ he said softly.
‘My house,’ she corrected quickly. ‘It’s my house. And I nearly lost it because of you.’
CHAPTER SIX
CATHERINE
Northampton, twenty-five years earlier
14 October
‘You bloody idiot,’ I muttered.
My heart had sunk when I’d read the letter. Eight weeks was all we had left in our home before the bank repossessed it. I’d been ignoring the stack of brown envelopes addressed to Simon and crammed them into the kitchen drawer, out of sight and out of mind. And I hadn’t given any thought to checking the balance in our account.
Money wasn’t something I’d ever needed to take responsibility for. I’d been more than happy to let him deal with our finances. I’d presumed he’d make sure we were okay, and as long as we kept a roof over our heads that was all that mattered. Silly old me.
So I’d only known there was a problem when the first cheque bounced. It rebounded off the doormat and back into my hand a few days after I gave it to a petrol station cashier. Two more soon tumbled through the letterbox from our gas and electricity suppliers.
But it wasn’t until my debit card was declined at the supermarket checkout that I knew I had to pull my red face out of the sand to see just how much trouble I was in. The fridge was almost bare, and the only food we had was waiting to be paid for in an abandoned trolley.
So I plucked up the courage to look at the bank statement and, through squinted eyes, regretted it straight away. I was up to my neck in an emergency overdraft I hadn’t known had been activated. Simon’s wages had always covered the utilities, but there was never much left to siphon off into a rainy-day account.
He and Steven had agreed that until the firm reached a certain profit, they’d only pay themselves a basic sum. But now, with only half the work being done, Steven had barely enough to cover his own expenses, let alone mine. There was little in the way of spare cash, and certainly not enough to survive a drought. And after three months of natural erosion, the reservoir was dry.