Page 10

9

E mily crossed the courtyard, stopped in the kitchen and walked up the back stairs, all without seeing another person. She found the makeshift interview room empty. Around her, the house was still and quiet, its air dead.

There wasn’t much to do while she waited for someone to appear. She’d left her phone behind this time, as instructed, and the laptop wasn’t connected to any network. She didn’t want to sit in silence, because that only invited thoughts of emails and thick envelopes sent by solicitors, and what they all might mean. She briefly considered a search for the other connecting door, but didn’t want to get risk getting caught snooping around the house on day one. She went to the window overlooking the beach and scanned for more mysterious figures, but there was nobody out there. She crossed the room to the window facing into the courtyard just in time to see Jack and Grace emerging from the archway.

They were arguing.

She couldn’t hear them – Beach Read’s glass was thick enough to block out the noise of the building site across the street and voices from immediately below – but even on mute, the tension was obvious. Grace had her arms folded and Jack was walking a little ahead, both of their faces set tight with annoyance, trading snipes with one another. Emily stepped back, into the folds of the curtain, so she could watch without being seen.

The dynamic was puzzling.

This was, after all, Grace at work, for the publisher of Jack’s book – a major acquisition for Morningstar, maybe their most important one in recent memory. But this behaviour was hardly professional and, worse, it suggested a disquieting familiarity. Grace had only arrived yesterday too. She hadn’t had the time to get to know Jack well enough to justify talking to him like this.

Emily was also seeing a new side of her – up until now – pleasant, friendly, easy-going subject.

As she watched, Grace stopped and grabbed Jack by his upper arm, stopping him too. He swung around to face her, his back to Emily now, and put his hands on his hips. The stance seemed to telegraph some kind of demand, a what’s the problem? or a what do you expect me to do? Grace spoke quickly, jabbing a finger in the air. Jack’s shoulders rose and fell with what looked like a sigh of exasperation.

Then Grace pointed up at Bookmark and Jack shook his head and, with a sinking feeling, Emily realized they were talking about her.

That morning’s interview must have gone so badly, Morningstar were firing her but Jack was objecting. Or Jack wanted to fire her and Grace was having to tell him that he couldn’t. Or the two of them had been watching her in the courtyard, waiting, until they could convene in the garage to privately discuss their shared dissatisfaction and plot how to deliver the bad news. Or they were talking about something else, a secret they were actively keeping from her, and although it was strange and juvenile and more than a little ridiculous given the circumstances, that possibility inflicted the sting of being left out.

Jack walked off, disappearing from sight, and Grace followed. A moment later, Emily heard a door open downstairs. She flung herself quickly into the chair behind the desk. Footsteps on a hardwood floor. She tapped the laptop to life and tried to settle into the position of someone who’d been sitting there for longer. A creak on the stairs. The laptop screen was showing a virtually empty desktop, but she stared at it with her brow furrowed in concentration. Jack entered the room. She waited a beat, then looked up at him in pretend surprise and saw an apology on his face.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Went for a walk to stretch my legs and lost track of time. You weren’t waiting too long, were you?’

‘No, no,’ Emily said quickly. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Have you had a chance to go explore yet?’ He walked past her to retake his seat on the couch.

‘I didn’t think there was that much to see?’

‘It’s really weird,’ he said, ‘but they’ve already built the town square. They started with it. Nothing’s open yet, but it’s all there, ready to go. And then there’s the art. Sculptures and stuff, dotted all around the place.’

Emily typed some gobbledegook and asked as casually as she could, ‘Did Grace go with you? I didn’t see her around during lunch.’

‘No, I needed some time to think.’ He paused. ‘About what you said.’

‘What did I say?’

‘My lowest ebb. I think I know what it was.’ He nodded at the voice-recorder. ‘Do you want to …?’

‘Oh. Yeah. Sure.’ If she was getting fired, it wasn’t happening just yet. She dutifully pressed the R ECORD button and checked for the red light. ‘Ready when you are.’

‘Well,’ Jack started, ‘this isn’t the first bad thing to happen to me – as I’m sure you know. As everyone knows because the Irish media bloody loves a sob story. The biggest mistake I ever made was after I won my first national championship. Some guy comes up to me and sticks his phone in my face and starts asking how I’m feeling, are my parents proud, that kind of thing, and I said, “My dad passed away in a car accident when I was thirteen, so …”’

The biggest mistake I ever made , Emily noted.

‘And the guy is all apologies,’ Jack continued, ‘but the very next day, in one of the tabloids, the sports section has a full page about my win being a “triumph after tragedy”. From then on, every single interview, I’m being asked about the accident and how it affected me and what I thought my dad would be saying about my success if he was still around.’

Emily only knew what Jack’s Wikipedia page had to say about what had happened, which was that his father had had a fatal heart attack while driving and crashed their car into a tree. Jack was with him, but emerged relatively unscathed – except, presumably, for the trauma of seeing his father’s broken and bloody body in the seat next to him.

‘And then,’ Jack said, ‘just before Rio, one of my best friends died by suicide. Charlie. I’d known him since we’d both been racing as Juniors. His career wasn’t going the way he hoped and I guess … Well, we don’t really know. But it was a shock. I was on autopilot for those Games, just trying to get through it. And I did, but it all sort of built up inside. It had nowhere to go because I wasn’t thinking about it, let alone processing anything. I was like a pressure cooker by the time I got back home. So I blew up.’

‘What did that look like?’

Emily had asked because she thought he might be talking about a violent episode, but Jack said, ‘I suppose you’d call it a nervous breakdown. I crawled into bed and I didn’t really get out for, like, six weeks.’

‘Have you ever talked about that publicly?’

She didn’t think she’d come across that detail before.

Jack shook his head. ‘And I don’t know if I want to. I’m pretty sure Charlie’s family wouldn’t want it included and there’s no way I’d even risk upsetting them, so … Yeah. And then, there was the crash.’

When it didn’t seem like he was going to elaborate, Emily said, ‘Can you tell me a bit about that? I don’t really know the details.’

He shrugged. ‘It was the 2019 Tour. My first. I’m on track for a top-ten, maybe even a top-five finish. In my first Tour, which is incredible. I’m feeling good, but the heat has been the problem. Two stages earlier, it was forty degrees. Now, we’re coming down the Col de l’Iseran and along comes a freak hailstorm. These things are so huge, it looks like snow on the ground and it feels like ice. In July. There’s talk on the radio of landslides further down.’ He was saying all this in a flat monotone, as if it were something he was painfully bored of having to recite. ‘They decide to neutralize the stage and direct us to take shelter in a tunnel. The team cars will pick us up there. But before I can get to it, I lose it in a corner, go flying off the bike and tumble down the side of a mountain.’

‘Jesus,’ Emily breathed. ‘What happened?’

‘Don’t know. I don’t remember it. Lost grip on the ice, I suppose. My teammate went down too, but at least he managed to stay on the road. He ended up with only scrapes and bruises.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘Two fractures in my thigh bone, broken right wrist, fractured eye-socket, collarbone, hip.’ Jack pointed to each location as he named them. ‘And lots of bruises and scrapes, and a concussion. I was completely knocked out.’ He paused. ‘I still think I could’ve made a full recovery if it wasn’t for the hip. That’s what did me in, in the end. There’s only so much physio can do. I could’ve taken the pain, but I just didn’t have the strength anymore, after that. So, that was the end. Not just of my Tour, but my career.’

‘That must have been devastating.’

‘The team kept me around for a while, to trot me out for events and dinners. Sponsor things. I think my official title was’ – Jack rolled his eyes at this – ‘ Team Ambassador . I wasn’t happy about it, but I was trying to stay in the good books, to keep the door open. I was still thinking I had a chance to come back. It was at one of those events that I met Kate.’

‘When was this?’

‘November 2019. She wasn’t on TV back then. Not yet. She was still doing MC-ing, corporate events, in-house marketing … That night she was working for Sabin, one of the sponsors.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘S-A-B-I-N.’

He’d pronounced it sabah , as if it were French.

‘What do they do?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ Jack said. ‘One of those companies that has ads with, like, children running through a field and then a time-lapse of a green shoot coming up out of the ground and then the Earth from space. They could be doing anything, but whatever it is, it’s probably ruining the planet.’

‘I can look them up. What did Kate do for them?’

‘Different things, bits and pieces – but that night she had a crew with her and they were filming something for a shareholders’ presentation, I think.’

‘Where was this?’

‘In èze,’ Jack said. ‘It’s this crazy rabbit-warren of a town perched on the very top of a hill just outside Nice. Incredible views. But it was absolutely freezing.’

‘Do you remember seeing Kate for the first time?’

Jack nodded. ‘She was sticking a microphone in my face, asking me how it felt to be part of the Sync-AIC family’ – another eye-roll – ‘and I wasn’t in the mood, and she told me to stop being a grumpy prick and do my job so she could do hers.’

Emily raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘And that’s when you thought, I’m going to marry that woman ?’

‘Not at that exact moment, no,’ he said with a weak grin. ‘But I was definitely intrigued. I mean, at the time, everyone else was treating me like I had a terminal illness. She was having absolutely none of my moping. I saw her a couple more times, at other events, and we’d always end up sort of drifting towards each other, but I didn’t want to mortify myself. And I heard she might have a boyfriend. Another rider, actually. Eventually, though, I worked up the courage – or drank enough beers – to ask her out for a drink, and she said no. But she did agree to meet me for a walk on the Prom. Her suggestion.’

‘What’s the Prom?’ Emily asked.

‘The Promenade des Anglais, in Nice. The walk along the seafront.’

‘Were you living there?’

‘I was,’ Jack said. ‘Kate was living in Newbridge, but she’d tacked a few personal days onto her work trip.’

‘So how did that go, the walk?’

‘Terrible,’ Jack said, ‘because it was more of a hobble. You see, the better your body is at cycling, the worse it is at everything else. You’re optimized for the bike but you can barely walk a mile. You have weak arms, bad posture, your spine is constantly complaining … Not to mention the highly attractive tan lines. And I was all that plus recovering from injury. I was like some hundred-year-old man shuffling along next to my very attractive nurse. I managed for about twenty minutes and then I suggested we get a coffee instead. We went to one of the beach restaurants and we ended up staying there the whole day. Lunch, more coffee, drinks, dinner. Talking about everything and anything, until the sun set. We had to pay the bill at intervals, because our waiters kept finishing their shift. And that was …’ His voice trailed off as his face fell, a curtain of devastation falling over the happy memory. ‘That was it.’

Emily let a beat pass.

‘What happened to the other guy?’ she asked then. ‘The boyfriend?’

‘He was dispatched pretty quick,’ Jack said. ‘And boyfriend was probably a strong word. Are you married?’

‘Me? No. God, no.’

‘Why do you say it like that?’

‘Just because, you know, major life events are for grown-ups. I’m not one of them yet. Neither is Mark.’

‘What does he do?’ Jack asked.

‘He’s a writer too.’

‘Really?’

‘Not books but poetry, short stories, essays … That kind of thing.’

‘What’s that like?’

‘The poetry?’

‘You both being writers.’

‘It’s fine.’

Jack looked at her, waiting for more.

‘We’re supposed to be talking about you,’ she said, straightening up.

‘Right. Yeah … Well, my point is, if I hadn’t had the accident that ended my cycling career, I wouldn’t have met Kate. So, OK, all these bad things happened. But I also got to realize my dream of cycling professionally. I was a national champion, I won an Olympic medal and I got to ride in the Tour de France. I built a successful business. I met Kate. I got to do incredible things and have amazing experiences and see the world and have, on balance, a wonderful life. I’ve had tragedy and terrible luck and pain and grief, but I’ve also had incredible fortune.’

Emily’s eyes flicked to the voice-recorder, checking for the reassurance of the blinking red light.

‘I always thought,’ Jack continued, ‘that there’s a kind of cosmic compensation. In my life, the highs have been incredibly high and the lows unbelievably low. But there’s a balance . I didn’t consider myself any more unlucky than a guy sat behind a desk for forty years who never has anything bad happen to him – because he has to sit behind that desk.’

‘Do you still believe that?’

Emily needed the answer to be no, because if there really was such a thing as cosmic balance, then what of the people who did the bad things? Wouldn’t bad things have to happen to them, for balance? Wouldn’t the universe punish them for what they’d done?

I know who you are. I know what you did .

Jack shook his head, once, firmly. ‘I stopped believing it the night of the fire. I wasn’t able to believe it after that. Because how could that be fair? On top of everything else? How much is a person supposed to be able to take? And then … Then, it got worse. Although worse doesn’t even begin to describe … I don’t have the word. I don’t know if there is one. But there was a knock on the door and it was two Garda detectives and they were coming to tell me that they thought I’d killed my wife . And that – that was my lowest ebb.’

He wiped at his eyes, bit down hard on his bottom lip.

Jack was crying.