Chapter 1

Saturday 2 October 2005, 1729hrs

I tried to ring a dozen times in the previous half hour, as soon as I left the built-up area around Aston Villa and got on the motorway. Normally, on the rare occasions that Gina didn’t attend the matches with me, our season ticket seats were next to each other, I would’ve expected her to answer. Now that every businessman or businesswoman carried a mobile phone and was ready to answer even if they were in the middle of shopping, I increasingly feared the worst, that this was not a one-off tryst, but this was time stolen by lovers from our expected afternoon together. I stopped at a service station, copied the text I had received and sent it to her in an email with an added, ‘is it true?’

It took ten minutes before my phone rang. It was her.

“Harry—”

“Answer the question, Gina, is it true?”

“ ... yes, but —”

“Goodbye, Gina, hope you both have a good life.”

I broke the connection, but Gina kept on ringing me. I didn’t answer, except a couple of times I pressed the decline switch. She pinged texts, she rang me again and again. I was on a motorway but not really heading anywhere, and certainly not heading home, it was no longer ‘home’ for me. I just needed to do something, anything but talk to Gina. Then she bloody well rang me again, this time using someone else’s number. I answered.

“H, we need to talk—” she said.

I hung up and threw the phone on the passenger seat.

This was an emergency, I felt, so pulled off onto the hard shoulder. I took the phone that was ringing again, walked up to the corrugated road barrier, and hurled that phone as far into the unlit inky blackness of the empty countryside as I could.

Almost as soon as it left my hand I knew I would have trouble contacting my two kids because their numbers were recorded on that phone and nowhere else. I knew I had Sophia Elizabeth’s work number on my laptop in the boot of the car, because she was working for King & Son now that her children had left home shortly after her divorce. She would have the other numbers. My eldest son Gerald was in his fifties by now, still teaching maths and completely indifferent to me. Sophia would speak to him on my behalf. My adopted son Giles will have heard his mother’s side of the story by Monday at work, Giles was Deputy Chairman of Gina’s company. Bobby and Maisie had their own lives to lead and could contact me through Sophia Elizabeth. Funnily enough, they never did. Gina must’ve got her version of the story in before me and they believed her.

Sophia Elizabeth was still able to write her occasional letters to me via a Post Box number, which I sent her in a text a few days later. I was able to pick the letters up when I drove into that town for shopping every couple of weeks. She was the only member of the family that bothered to contact me, sending me a birthday card and letter, then a Christmas card and letter that first couple of years. I eventually gave my postcode and the number 3, my number on the door of the cottage. I never got any visitors from anyone in the family. I’d left no forwarding address so I got no other letters or bills, not even the divorce papers. Basically, from October 2005 I lived the life of a bitter recluse.