Read Online Name To a Face by Robert Goddard - Free Book Online Page A

at one point.
    “No. Of course not.”
    “It’s just that I have the sense…”
    “What?”
    “Well, that you… feel guilty about it in some way.”
    It was true. Though how Hayley had sensed it Harding could not imagine. “When she was dying,” he said in an undertone, “it got to the stage when I just wanted it to be over. For her sake, so I told myself. But it was for my sake as well. I’ve always reproached myself for that. In the end, I was willing her to die, to release me, if you like, to… make it easier for me.”
    “That was only natural.”
    “Or plain selfish.”
    “It’s how you coped, that’s all. And regretting it since… is part of the process.”
    “Is it?”
    “I think so, yes.”
    “Then how come no one else has ever guessed that’s how I felt?”
    “Most people don’t have much of an imagination, Tim. And a few, like me”-she smiled-“have too much.”
    St. Ives. The wind was stronger than on the south coast, ripping and eddying along the narrow picture-postcard streets. But the cloud was thinner. Sunlight deepened the blue of the sea and gilded the lichened roofs of the town. They walked out from the station to St. Ives Head, where they were battered by the wind, and soon doubled back to the Sloop Inn on the quayside for lunch.
    It was there that Hayley finished a brisk summary of her life. Born in Colchester in 1971, the youngest of three daughters of chartered accountants, she was expensively educated, took a degree in music at Durham and pursued her dream of playing the harp for a living until an imprecisely diagnosed wrist disorder intervened. Her long-standing relationship with a concert violinist foundered on his ill-disguised belief that the disorder was psychological in origin. London readily became a hateful place to be for a newly single ex-harpist the wrong side of thirty. She remembered the passage in
A la recherche du temps perdu
in which Proust conjured up the magical appeal of the rail route from Paris to the far west of Brittany and impulsively took the train from Paddington to the far west of Cornwall.
    “A man reading
The Cornishman
joined the train at St. Erth. He left the classifieds section on the seat when he got off at Penzance. I picked it up. And there was Gabriel’s ad for a live-in housekeeper. Pure chance. Or maybe you’d call it fate. If you believe in fate.”
    “I think I might.”
    “But have you ever been to Colchester?”
    “Not that I recall.”
    “Or Durham?”
    “Once.”
    “When I was a student there in the early nineties?”
    “No. Not then.”
    “What about the brasserie in the Park Lane Hilton when I was playing the harp? Or when
anyone
was playing the harp?”
    “No.”
    “So you see, Tim, if fate has brought us together, it isn’t for a second time.”
    “Maybe not. But I can’t-”
    He had glanced out through the window they were sitting by as he spoke. Suddenly, his attention was seized by a familiar face among the passers-by on the quay. His gaze was met, coolly and cockily by Darren Spargo.
    Harding jumped up and made for the door. The pub was busy a Sunday lunchtime crowd milling at the bar. By the time he had forced his way through and made it outside, Spargo had vanished. Harding looked along the quay and the main shopping street. There was no sign of Spargo. The winding, twining back streets and alleys that led off in all directions offered a wealth of escape routes. Pursuit was not merely futile but impossible.
    “Sorry about that,” he said to Hayley as he made a shamefaced return to their table in the Sloop.
    “What happened?”
    “You wouldn’t believe it.”
    “Try me.”
    Harding sighed. “I saw someone who I’m more or less certain stole my mobile yesterday. At the Turk’s Head in Penzance.”
    “Really?”
    “His name’s Darren Spargo.”
    “Darren?”
    “You know him?”
    “Oh my God.” Hayley’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry, Tim. I’m
really
sorry.”
    “Why?”
    “Darren’s my