on the keyboard, hit the return button, and stared at the computer screen, unable to get Sarah in that red dress and high heels out of his mind. So she had married Ian Aitken. How could she? She’d had little to no time for Ian at university, even though the poor bugger was clearly in love with her. So what had changed? Or had she married him just to please her family? The thought repelled him.
She’d hurt him so deeply the pain had never really gone away and seeing her had only re-opened the old wound. She’d refused to go to Australia with him and she’d not responded to a single one of the dozens of letters he’d sent her from there, nor the phone call either. She’d effectively ended the relationship without the courtesy of an explanation, though he guessed what had happened after he’d left. Ian would’ve been waiting in the wings, all too ready to offer tea and sympathy.
But maybe she wasn’t what she’d pretended to be. What if he’d never known the real Sarah? Maybe his going to Australia was the opportunity she’d been waiting for? An opportunity to end a relationship she was too cowardly to finish face-to-face.
He brought his closed fist down quietly on the table. She was here, somewhere, in this very building, Laganside Tower, going about her business along with the twelve hundred other staff. And these questions were driving him mad.
He had not known she worked for VTS, and when he saw her at the Europa Hotel two days ago, shimmering like a star amongst the drab suits and dreary conversation, he’d not, at first, believed his eyes.
He had not imagined that her appearance would be so largely unchanged from when he’d last seen her, twenty years ago. There were fine wrinkles on her skin, yes, but she had the same pretty face framed by that blonde hair, cut into a shorter, neater style than the one she’d worn at uni. The same big, grey doe eyes and slim, boyish figure that had entranced him from the first moment he’d set eyes on her folding her knickers with intense focus in the uni laundry … he swallowed and shook his head to dispel that particular image.
He was a little ashamed of the way he’d flirted with Jody in front of Sarah – but he’d been angry when he heard the name Aitken and he took a mean sort of satisfaction in her response. She’d gone red and stomped off in a huff almost as if she cared. And the idea that his tiny act of revenge might have made her jealous, might have hurt her, pleased him. She’d taught him that it wasn’t what people said that mattered, but what they did. She’d talked of nothing but how much she loved him, but in the end, her actions spoke more loudly than any words she’d ever uttered. Her lack of courage had disappointed him almost as much as his heart hurt. He’d always thought her better than that.
Even now, thinking of it all these years later, he was angry. He’d come here to Northern Ireland for work, that was true, but he’d also come for answers. He put a closed fist to his lips and stared out the twelfth-floor window across a cityscape recognisable to him only by the mammoth yellow cranes of the shipyard and the Belfast Hills – Cavehill, Divis, Black Mountain and the rest – that surrounded the city on three sides, behind which the late afternoon sun was setting. Closer up, he barely recognised this vibrant, optimistic place as the grey, barricaded Belfast he’d known as a young man. Brand new buildings had sprouted up all over the place like saplings reaching for the sun, and everywhere he went he met bright young people full of energy.
A lock of blonde hair fell into his line of vision and he started.
‘Hey, what’re you up to, sunshine?’ said Jody in his right ear, her cloying perfume filling his nostrils. Then she perched on the edge of his desk, crossed her long tanned legs, encased in nylons, and glanced at the computer screen. ‘Oh, you’re looking at rentals. In …’ She peered closer. ‘Bally-what?’
‘Ballyfergus,’ he said, wishing she would go away. It wasn’t personal – he’d worked with Jody, fifteen years his junior, for two years and they’d always got on well. But right now he’d rather be alone with his thoughts. ‘It’s a little town, a port actually, twenty-five miles north of Belfast.’ She looked a little puzzled and he added, remembering that she’d been raised in metric Australia, ‘That’s about forty kilometres.’
Leaning over, she stared more closely at the picture of a rather drab terrace house on the computer screen and frowned. ‘Why would you want to rent a place there? I thought we’d all stay in Belfast for the six months.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s where I grew up.’
‘Oh, I see, so you can be near your family. I’d love to meet them sometime,’ she said, putting special emphasis on ‘love’ and leaning in even closer to peer at the screen.
He cleared his throat. Hell would freeze over before he’d introduce anyone on the team to his family. He never talked about his background at work. He clicked a button and the terrace house disappeared from the screen.
‘I’ve been offered a room in a flat owned by one of the girls in admin,’ she went on in the face of his silence.
‘Take it. It’ll be much nicer than living out of a suitcase in a hotel. You’ll get to know the place better that way. Might even pick yourself up a Belfast man.’ He winked at her and she pouted, then pulled her suit jacket tight round her slim frame and said, ‘Hmm. Well, I don’t know how anyone can live here. How they can stand the cold. Isn’t this supposed to be spring?’
He smiled. ‘Wait till it rains for days on end. Then you’ll have something to complain about.’
She laughed more than the joke merited, then said, in that peculiarly animated way of hers, her blue eyes wide like saucers, ‘Some of the locals have invited us out for drinks and dinner after work at a place called Cayenne. It’s owned by some celebrity chef and the food’s supposed to be fantastic. Fancy it?’
He shook his head. ‘I’ve got other plans for tonight.’
‘Oh?’ She picked up a pencil and twirled it between her fingers like a miniature cheerleader’s baton.
‘I’m going to Ballyfergus.’
‘To see family?’
He shrugged non-committally. Something about the gleam in her eye and the way the baton stilled in her hand, made him even more cautious than normal.
‘You wouldn’t be going out on a date, would you, and not telling me?’ The corners of her mouth twitched, though the big toothy smile remained in place.
He laughed falsely. ‘No. What makes you ask that?’
She threw her head back and laughed, the sinews on her neck standing out, her long blonde hair like a mane. A man, walking by on his way to the photocopier, was so busy watching her he nearly walked into a filing cabinet and swerved to avoid it just in time. She was, he supposed, a fine-looking woman and it was surprising that she was still single. She brought her gaze to bear on him once more. ‘Oh, it’s just a feeling I have.’
‘What feeling?’ he said idly, hitting keys on the keyboard.
‘About you and Sarah Aitken. I sensed there was a kind of …’ She raised her eyebrows questioningly, '… tension between you two.’
He felt himself go hot under the collar. Heat rose up his neck. ‘She’s an old friend.’
‘That all?’
He cleared his throat. ‘We used to go out together. But that ended a long time ago. It’s history.’
The pencil stilled and Jody’s eyes narrowed with sly understanding. ‘Well, if you hadn’t told me that, I would’ve said there was some unfinished business there. You could have cut the atmosphere between you with a knife.’ She gave him a tight smile that didn’t reach her eyes and set the pencil down carefully beside her on the table. ‘But what do I know? Have a nice time tonight.’
Cahal parked self-consciously outside the grim block of flats, wishing that he’d chosen a much less ostentatious rental car than the shiny new Vauxhall Insignia. Here on the Drumalis estate where he’d grown up, where car ownership still appeared to be the exception rather than the rule, it stuck out