started by mentioning a cottage in St Mary’s.’
‘St Mary’s?’
‘Where I used to live with Layla.’
‘So what has that got to do with me?’
‘The person who’s sending them – they’re trying to make me think that Layla is alive.’
‘Oh my God.’ Her eyes widen. ‘That’s horrible, Finn!’ A frown crosses her brow. ‘But why would I want you to think that Layla is alive?’
I look hard at her. ‘So that I don’t marry Ellen?’
Her mouth drops open. ‘Seriously?’ She shakes her head. ‘I don’t know whether to be amused or outraged. Amused that you could think I’d want to stop you, outraged that you think I could be so cruel as to make you think Layla is alive.’ Her brown eyes search out mine. ‘Surely you know me better than that?’
‘It’s not just the email address.’ I take the Russian doll from my pocket and stand it on the table between us. ‘I found this with the bill.’
‘Yes, you said.’ She picks it up and examines it. ‘Cute. But what has it got to do with anything?’
And that’s when I realise that Ruby couldn’t have known the story of the Russian dolls because I had never told her. ‘Did you see anyone suspicious hanging round the bar earlier?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. The pub was too packed for me to notice anything much.’ She hands the doll back to me. ‘Someone must have found it on the floor and put it on the counter and it somehow found its way onto the plate with your bill on it.’
‘Probably,’ I say vaguely, because something has just occurred to me. Only Ellen, Layla and I know the story of the Russian dolls.
And Harry, because Ellen told him.
Before
You never asked me why I left Ireland and came to England. I’m not sure you really realised that I had a life over there, a life I’d rather forget about because I’m not proud of the person I was back then. People called me a gentle giant and until my mid-teens that was probably the case. At least, I never remember losing my temper before my dad told me I couldn’t go out one night, and as he stood in front of the locked front door, I raised my fist and punched a hole right through it. The worst thing was, I’d been aiming for his face and if he hadn’t ducked I would have done him some serious damage. Hopefully, the love I felt for him would have kicked in and I would have stopped after that first punch. The door had no love to protect it, so it got hammered into a splintered mess.
The incident terrified both my parents and me. We’d had no idea of the touch-paper that nestled deep inside me, waiting to be ignited. They impressed on me the need to recognise the warning signs and urged me to walk away from situations of conflict, citing the added danger of my size. And apart from a couple of incidents where I left people with broken noses, I managed to stay out of trouble. Until I met Siobhan.
Siobhan was my first real love. Now I know that what I felt for her was nothing to what I felt for you. But there was that same intensity, the same feeling that we were meant to be together. We didn’t speak of marriage or anything like that, we were still at university. But once I started seeing her, I didn’t notice any other girl, I only had eyes for her, just as I’d had for you. Then one day, when we’d been together for about a year, a week or so after graduation, she said she had something to tell me. She looked worried, scared even, and my first thought was that maybe she was ill, or someone in her family was. Instead, she told me that she was in love with my best friend and had been seeing him behind my back for months.
I actually laughed, thinking it was a wind-up, because only the day before I’d told Pat, over a couple of pints, how happy I was with Siobhan. I’d immediately felt embarrassed for confiding in him and when I saw a shadow pass over his face, I thought he was feeling the same embarrassment and blamed my emotional outburst on the drink.
Even now, all these years later, I can’t bear to remember what I did, I can’t bear to remember how, when I realised Siobhan was deadly serious, I yelled that I was going to kill her. I can’t bear to remember how, when I clenched my hands into fists and drew my arm back, she cowered in front of me, screaming at me to stop. It was my father’s words about removing myself from situations of conflict that pierced through the fog in my brain, and dropping my arms, I shoved her aside so that I could get to the door. But she fell, hitting her head on the edge of a low table. And as she lay there pale and motionless on the floor, I thought I’d done what only moments before I had threatened to do, and killed her.
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