‘And your parents were meant to have moved to Leicester. There was a “sold” sign at the end of their track for weeks.’
‘I know. But I moved to LA, and I was the problem. Their buyer fell through and they decided to stay. I think by then it was pretty clear I wasn’t coming back.’
A long silence fell.
‘Could I ask why you call yourself Eddie David?’ I asked, when it became unbearable. ‘Surely your name’s Eddie Wallace?’
‘David’s my middle name. I started using it after the accident. For a while everyone recognized my name and there’d be all this . . . I don’t know . . . kind of suffocating sympathy, I suppose, when people realized who I was. It was easier to be Eddie David. Nobody knew him. Just like nobody knew Sarah Mackey.’
After a while he turned to look at me, but his gaze was pulled away again, like water running back to the sea. ‘I’d give anything to have worked out who you were before it was too late,’ he said. ‘I just – I just can’t believe we never made the connection.’ He scratched his head. ‘You know they let him out after five years?’
I nodded. ‘He moved to Portsmouth, I heard.’
Eddie said nothing.
‘It was my Facebook, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘You saw a post from Tommy. He called me Harrington.’
‘I saw it about twenty seconds after you left. And for the first minute or so, before the shock set in properly, I just thought,No. Pretend you haven’t seen that. Make it go away, because I can’t not be with her. It’s only been a week, butshe’s . . .’He flushed. ‘She’s everything,’ he finished off. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’
We sat in silence for a long time. My heart was racing. Eddie’s cheeks were faintly red.
Then he told me about his mother, about her depression, how it had exploded after Alex’s death and deteriorated into a complex mental health cocktail from which she had never really emerged. He told me she had moved to Sapperton when she’d come out of the worst of the breakdown, because she wanted to be ‘closer’ to her dead daughter. Recognizing that she was too vulnerable to survive alone, Eddie had abandoned any hopes of returning to university and moved in with her for a while. He persuaded Frank, the sheep farmer, to rent him a crumbling cow barn on the edge of Siccaridge Wood, which he slowly turned into a workshop and then, once she was able to live on her own, a home of his own.
‘Dad funded it,’ he said. ‘Cash was his solution to everything, after he left us. He couldn’t bring himself to call, once Alex’s funeral was over, or to come and visit, but he was fine sending money. So I decided to be fine about spending it.’
He told me about the day he’d discovered who I was. How the trees outside his barn had seemed to collapse in on him as he reframed me as Sarah Harrington, the girl who’d killed his sister. How he’d cancelled his holiday to Spain. Put his commissions on hold. How he’d gone to check on his mother one day and found her zonked out on medication, and the guilt he had felt as he had watched her sleep.
‘It would be catastrophic if she found out about me and you,’ he said quietly. ‘Although it felt pretty catastrophic even without her knowing. I fell into quite a hole. I didn’t look at Facebook, or emails, or anything. Just kind of cut myself off.Took a lot of walks. Did a lot of thinking and talking to myself.’
He cracked his knuckles. ‘Until my mate Alan turned up to check if I was dead and told me you’d been in touch.’
Then he sighed. ‘I should have replied to you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t. You were right – that’s no way to treat anyone. I started to write to you, again and again, but I just didn’t trust myself to talk to you.’
I tried not to imagine what he might have said.
‘But I loved your life story. Your messages. I craved them when they didn’t come. I read them over and over.’
I swallowed, trying not to attach meaning to this. ‘Did you ever call me?’ I asked tentatively.
He shook his head.
‘Are you sure? I had . . . I had some dropped calls. And, well, a message, telling me to stay away from you.’
He looked puzzled. ‘Oh. You wrote to me about that, didn’t you? In one of those letters? I’m sorry – I didn’t really pay it much attention. I think I just assumed you’d made it up.’
I winced.
‘Did you hear from them again?’
‘No. But I did think . . . Look, I did wonder if it might be your mother. Is there any way she could have found out about you and me? I saw a woman, on the canal path between my parents’ house and your barn . . . And when I went to Tommy’s sports thing at my old school, I saw someone wearing the same coat. I mean, I can’t be certain it was the same person, but I’m pretty sure it was. She wasn’t doing anything particularly strange, but both times I felt like I was being, well, stared at. And maybe in a hostile way.’
Eddie folded his arms. ‘That’s very odd,’ he said slowly. ‘But there’s absolutely nowayit was Mum. She hasn’t thefaintest clue about you. And anyway, she . . .’ He trailed off. ‘She’s just not capable of that sort of thing. Crank-calling, following people – that’s just way beyond her capabilities. She’d get super-stressed even thinking about doing something like that. In fact, she’d fall apart.’
‘And there’s nobody else it could have been?’
Eddie looked utterly confused. ‘No,’ he said, and I believed him. ‘The only person I told was my best mate, Alan, and his wife, Gia. Oh, and Martin from football, because he also saw your post on my Facebook page. But all of them I told in confidence.’
He leaned forward, his face knotted with concentration. He must have failed to get anywhere, though, because after a few minutes he shrugged and straightened up. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t Mum. Of that you can be certain.’
