Ghostheart by R.J. Ellory

ever read?’
    She smiled. ‘The most important book I’ve ever read? How is it possible to answer a question like that?’ she said, and then it came to her, came to her so easily, and she started to smile wider, her face relaxing, her tension easing so comfortably.
    ‘Which one?’ he prompted.
    ‘A book called
Breathing Space
,’ she said. ‘My father left it for me … one of the few things he left for me.’ She touched the face of the watch on her wrist, and in that moment she recalled an image of her father, vague and indistinct, standing there in the hallway of their house. It had been raining then also. She could remember the sound of the water hitting the deck beyond the kitchen, and there was a smell in the air like cinnamon, and something else unidentifiable. He was leaving, always leaving it seemed. She couldn’t have been more thanfive years old, perhaps six, and had she known then that he would be alive for no more than a year or two she would have rushed towards him, thrown her arms around him, told him she loved him, that she didn’t want him to leave again. She tried to concentrate on the image, tried to focus, but there was nothing more than a feeling.
    There was a tightness in her chest, her throat felt constricted, and when she blinked there was moisture around her eyes.
    David squeezed her hand, and only then did she become aware that he had never let go. A lifeline. Tenuous, fragile, but nevertheless a lifeline. To what she didn’t know, and in that moment it didn’t matter. She was not alone. That was the main thing, and she appreciated it.
    ‘You okay?’ he asked, his voice sympathetic, gentle.
    ‘Fine,’ she said, but there was a reserve in her tone that said she wasn’t so fine at all.
    ‘What did he do?’ David asked.
    ‘Do?’
    ‘Your father … what did he do?’
    Annie didn’t speak for some time. She tried to recall something, anything. She tried to picture him leaving with a bag, a holdall perhaps, some kind of uniform? She could remember nothing at all.
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I honestly don’t know what he did.’ Her voice conveyed her uncertainty and confusion. She found it hard to believe that this thought had never really crossed her mind before.
    ‘And your mother never told you?’ David inquired.
    Annie shook her head.
    ‘You never asked?’
    Annie was still for a while. ‘I must have done,’ she said quietly. ‘I must have asked her … and she must have told me.’
    There was a silence between them, as if here in this moment some deep secret had been unearthed, something that even as she considered it brought a sense of potential alarm. Howcould she arrive at thirty years of age and not have the faintest clue as to her own father’s profession?
    ‘Perhaps he was a spy,’ David said, and he smiled, and the tension was broken.
    ‘Perhaps,’ she replied, and tried to engage in the levity he was attempting. It worked, just a little, but nevertheless that aura of mystery prevailed.
    ‘The mysterious Mister O’Neill,’ David said.
    She was elsewhere for a moment, and then she looked up and saw David once again massaging the back of his neck. It seemed like a nervous habit now, something he couldn’t control.
    ‘You okay?’ she asked.
    He nodded. ‘Sure … why d’you ask?’
    ‘Your neck,’ she said. ‘You keep rubbing the back of your neck.’
    ‘It aches sometimes,’ he said. ‘Just a little.’
    Annie glanced at her watch. It was gone two o’clock. There had been no customers, not one, despite turning the sign when she’d left for sandwiches. Perhaps the rain kept them away. Perhaps the unspoken thought that at such a time as this she didn’t wish to be disturbed. Sullivan would have said the latter.
    ‘You don’t have to go to work?’ she asked.
    ‘No,’ David said. ‘I’m on leave. Work is so unpredictable, and sometimes we’re away weeks at a time. They like to give us breathing space every once in a