Heart Stopper Read online

  “Hello all.” Valerie looked around the room and spotted James and Sean still in their deep conversation. “Did they fly the whole clinic out here?” she asked. Damn, her voice still had that throaty quality that seemed to rasp ever so lightly at Priya’s chest, a gentle note that made her wish again, for just one second, Valerie was not the woman Priya knew she was.

  “Only the ones that were there with Daniel from the beginning,” Sheila said, her hackles raised.

  “Yes, I guess that one year you knew him must make it very hard for you.” Valerie glanced down at the hand Gerry placed on her forearm and then back at the women. “It’s a tough time for us all. Daniel said a lot of good things about his staff, he was very proud of all of you. Gerry, why don’t you stay here with the girls and I’ll just go in to give my condolences to Daniel’s grandfather. The poor man must be in a state.” Valerie nodded to them as she left and headed towards the door Priya had seen Reyna and her grandfather disappear through earlier.

  “So, ladies, you’re all looking very well, I must say.” Gerry Lynch offered a tight smile at the group. He was good looking in an average way, no distinguishing features, an overall pleasant effect. Slightly thicker than slim, fleshy over firm physique of a man who used to frequent the gym regularly in his thirties, but finds his attendance slipping as life over forty gets in the way. The gray showed through, sharp and precise, lined around the edges of his short styled black hair and the red on the tips of his ears and the back of his neck were always patchy on his pale complexion. Today, there was a matching red rim around his eyes.

  “Hello Dr. Lynch, isn’t it awful?” Sheila placed her hand on Gerry’s arm smiling up into his eyes. “Would you like something to drink; they seem to have everything here. No alcohol, I know. Don’t you sometimes wish you drank, at times like these? You must be devastated; you’ve known Daniel for so long.”

  “They were all in NUIG together for their Cardiology Fellowship. That’s how all of this started, isn’t it? The research company, the Mark I pacemaker, the controllers. You were pioneers, Gerry,” Priya said in a rush. She had always admired Gerry’s research work; he had been her mentor and friend when she had done her PhD research through the company. This had made her guilt all the harder to deal with.

  “I was adding up the years and we’ve known…Daniel and I knew each other since 1999. That’s 12 years. Twelve amazing years.” Gerry shook his head and looked around the room, “Aidan didn’t make it?”

  Clodagh piped up “I was just saying how he would have loved it here, well not loved it you know, being a funeral and all that, but…”

  “You’re right Clodagh, he would have loved it here. Now, how about we all go and refresh your glasses and I’ll grab a coffee.”

  ∞

  Priya didn’t see Reyna for the rest of the evening. She seemed to have disappeared with Daniel’s grandfather. After about a half hour, Valerie had come back on her own, and she and Gerry had left the reception a few minutes later. Priya stayed and left with the rest of the staff from the clinic. Priya spent the night at a hotel in New York and took the overnight flight for Shannon the next afternoon. The others were staying on for a few days in New York, but she wanted to put the events of the last week behind her and get back to the safety of home.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Friday, July 15, 2011

  The diplomat sat at his desk and stared at the device lying in front of him. The controller. For his pacemaker. He hadn’t realized the adjustment it would take, to accept that there was something alien in him. But it had only been five days; he assumed his acceptance would grow over time.

  He prodded the device, sliding it a few inches across the rough paper of his thought pad, as he liked to call it, the leather-sided rectangle of paper that rested on the desk. His scrawls now covered over half the surface of the paper, doodles, scribbles, endlessly repeating sketches of cartoon heart shapes.

  What punishment would he face, if he survived? Nobody would know anything, except him. And the man. The diplomat had sent his wife away to stay with her sister until the middle of August. She would need to be told that he’d had a pacemaker put in; he’d deal with that then. He had persuaded her that she needed a break, that he would be so busy carrying out his embassy duties he would have no time. But he had promised her time, after.

  He had 17 days.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Saturday, July 16, 2011

  Priya let herself into her house. She lived in what was now a very expensive area of Galway. Barna village was on the west coast of Ireland. It had started out as a satellite of Galway city, deserted in the winter, roads jam-packed in the summer as the Galwegians made a dash for the sea at the first sign of sun. Her parents had bought the house when they moved to Galway in the eighties and Priya was ten. Priya remained in the house when her parents left for New York in 1993. She was 18, doing a Science degree in NUIG; it would have been too much of an upheaval. So she stayed, and ended up staying. After 26 years here, she was as Irish now as the Irish would let her be. Despite having been born in New York and spending her early years in India with her grandparents, her main memories were now of Ireland, as was her passport.

  The house was silent. She had left it in a mess, in a hurry. The front of the house was dark, even on sunny afternoons. The kitchen at the back was bright, opening out onto a deck she had built herself so that she could sit out in the evening and soak in the panoramic view of the blue green and grey Atlantic.

  She picked up the junk mail off the floor. She’d only been gone two days, but there was a pile of the stuff. Businesses desperate for customers were offering whatever they could to a population that refused to spend now that they had spent their full during the years of the Celtic Tiger. The paint on the hallway wall was peeling in a few places. She just didn’t feel like touching it up. She added it to the list of tasks she had to get around to at some point. Since January, she had just gone to work in the morning, come back home in the evening, grabbed a glass of wine, and sat out on the deck absorbing the alcohol along with the sea salt air. She didn’t work on her on-going paintings or start new ones; her little studio in the box room waited, but the colors never flowed. She’d also never finished the last remaining credits for the Open University course on Art Therapy she had been doing. Some evenings she called to see Michael though mostly he came to her place if he wanted to see her. She knew he wanted to see her, but she didn’t want to see anyone. And most weekends she went out, searching for her pain, to drown it with alcohol and the occasional woman.

  She dropped her suitcase on the floor of the gloomy front room, shoved the junk mail onto the bookshelf and walked straight to the bright kitchen. She poured out a juice for herself and went out to the deck. The sun was on one of its rare early morning trips to Galway. On many occasions during the hour and a half drive from Shannon to Galway, she had found herself nodding off and only a determined effort and loud music on some station that played the classic hits of the 70s and 80s had kept her awake. As she drove through, Galway seemed to be slumbering, gearing itself up for the second week of its festival. She hadn’t slept on the overnight flight; the tourists on the full flight had not seemed as disturbed by the intermittent yelps of a protesting child in the row behind her. And now she didn’t want to sleep. She was restless. She settled in to the deckchair, glass of juice in hand.

  Something was wrong. The vague sense strengthened to the point that she couldn’t lie there. Sighing, she placed the glass down on the deck and walked back into the house. Nothing seemed out of place in the kitchen. She re-traced her steps into the living room. Her suitcase had fallen over and was lying on its side. She looked around the room. It was even darker after the dazzling sun sparkle off the waves. The paintings she had done over the past ten years were stacked in the living room, their bright faces resting against the wall. The two small windows looked out onto a tired front garden contained by a low stone wall that separated her from the road. It was the main road from G
alway to Connemara, but it was narrow; hemmed in by hedges and bracken intermittently punctuated by the entrance to a house.

  The furniture in the room had been purchased ten years ago and was showing signs of wear. The newer IKEA bookcase held her large collection of novels, an eclectic mix, as well as her textbooks for work. And that’s where she noticed what had set off the ripple in her mind. She always organized her books by author. She was disorganized in almost every other aspect of her life, but in this, she was pernickety. Books organized by author, and then by title, all alphabetically. She needed the comfort of her well-worn friends, of knowing where exactly to reach for the words that would take her out of her world, cheer her up, or at least accompany her on her despair. She saw now that the authors in ‘K’ were switched with the authors in ‘L’. Ludlum should be after King, but he wasn’t. She quickly scanned the rest of the shelf, all the others were in order, Roy coming after Picoult, Coben after Binchy, even her DIY books were still in alphabetical order.

  She rang Michael’s mobile. It was Saturday morning, exactly one week after she’d woken up with a dead man.

  Michael answered, “Hi, how was your trip?” He sounded chirpy. He was usually irritatingly happy in the mornings, she hated mornings.

  “Michael, did you call into my house while I was away by any chance?”

  “No hon, sorry, did you want me to? I thought since you were only going for a couple of days...”

  “No, no, I didn’t need you to, I was just wondering. Look, there’s something weird. It’s tiny, but it’s weird. You’re sure, you’re not kidding around, are you? Just tell me if you are, I’m too tired and it’s been a weird week.”

  “Priya, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Ludlum is before King. Well, one of Ludlum’s is actually in the middle of King’s.”

  “Priya, you don’t think this OCD thing with your books might just have gone a little teeny bit too far?”

  “Michael! You know me and my books. Someone was here. I was hoping it was you.”

  “Why would I want to go through your books? I’m more than happy with mine, dry and boring as they might be to you.” He paused. “Okay, look through the rest of the house; see if anything else has been disturbed. You’re sure there’s no-one there?”

  “Oh great, no I’m not sure, but I don’t get the feeling there’s anyone here. I haven’t been upstairs yet though.” She glanced at the stairs in the hall through the open living room door.

  “Wait for me. Don’t go upstairs. I know there’s probably no one there, but just hang on until I get there. You’d probably be better equipped to deal with anyone than I would be though, just get that baseball bat out.”

  Priya knew he was trying to lighten the tension, but he was probably right. He wouldn’t have been much good in a physical altercation. Even at her 5 foot 2 inches to his 6 foot 6 inches, it had been Priya who had stood up to the drunken debaters turned pushy in the college bar. Though usually because she’d started the trouble in the first place, annoyed by the alcohol-induced stupidity as she called it from her high moral ground of sobriety. She’d never actually gotten into a physical fight though.

  Priya whispered into her phone, “Hurry up then. I’m going to get the bat. Actually no, I can’t, it’s upstairs by the bed! Okay, I’m going to go outside to the back and wait for you. Two weaklings should be better than one.”

  The field at the back of her house was an acre of grass with brown gorse tufting out of the scattered rocks of varying sizes from pebbles to boulders. It ended at a 6-foot drop to the sea. Her own personal cliff. She picked her way carefully through the uneven ground, carrying the glass of juice in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other. She sat halfway down the field facing the house with her back against a large rock, feeling its warm solidity steady her nerves. The sound of the waves crashing against the stony reef soothed, its restless energy sapping hers. It was a long half hour.

  There was no movement in the house. The upstairs windows were empty. She didn’t have curtains in her bedroom preferring to be able to stare at the sea from her bed, or to sit on the windowsill dangling her legs over the short drop to the deck. Someone had been in her house, had gone through her things, and had touched her books. The thought galled her. It couldn’t have been a burglar. There were items downstairs that a burglar would have taken. Most of her stuff was of sentimental value, pieces gathered by her parents on their many trips to locations all over the world. But there were some commercially valuable things too. So if it wasn’t a burglar, who was snooping around her house?

  With a fright, she saw a movement at her bedroom window. And then it opened and Michael stuck his head out. He smiled when he saw her, back up against the rock clutching the glass and the knife, frowning at him.

  “All clear,” he yelled.

  She scrambled up. “I thought we were going to check together! Since when did you get so macho?”

  “Not macho, chivalrous. Now come up here and see if there’s anything else out of place.”

  ∞

  They sat together on the deck, she in her usual chair, and he in his. Like a married couple. Looking at him, she wished for the hundredth time she could have felt it. That almost desperate love he seemed to feel for her. They’d dated for two years while they were in college. It had actually been while she was in the relationship with him that she’d fallen for the first time for a woman, surprising her as much as it had shocked him. She’d had to make a choice, the security of Michael and his certain love versus the intensity and excitement of her emotions for a fellow student in the IT postgraduate program she’d done after her Science Masters degree. And she’d chosen Michael. But that had lasted just two more months, something irretrievably lost in the shuffle. She was glad she hadn’t left him at the time for a woman. Not because he wouldn’t have been able to deal with it, though she suspected he would have been crushed tighter by that, but because they were able to remain close friends, working through the end of their relationship, working out their commitment to each other that didn’t need a ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’ tag to validate its importance to them individually.

  They had searched the house and found nothing else out of place. Priya told Michael about meeting Reyna and Catherine, mostly Reyna. The woman's contempt burned in Priya's memory.

  Priya said, “Catherine thought there was a woman in the apartment with Daniel. She said she was going to find this woman no matter what.”

  Michael said, “Does she think this woman had something to do with Daniel’s death? I thought you said the GP said it was a heart attack?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Then what…? Does she think Daniel and this woman were, you know, having sex or something?”

  “I don’t know, Catherine didn’t come out and say it. Though Reyna thought I was the woman with him and she did pretty much come out and say it, that we’d been having sex and he died and I left him.” Priya’s voice faltered. “Reyna was pretty disgusted with me.”

  “Priya, you wouldn’t have been in the apartment if she hadn’t brought you there. I know she didn’t know that you had some kind of unpleasant history with Daniel, but still, she could have put you in danger.”

  “I guess from her point of view I must look like a real bitch. I mean, she thinks I’m Daniel’s girlfriend, I must have flirted with her, she has to take care of me as I’m too drunk to get home, she leaves me in her brother’s apartment, my boyfriend’s, and then her mother finds him dead and says there was a woman with him, in his bed. Jeez, Michael, when it’s put like that! And now her mother is going to keep digging to find out who was there.”

  Priya put her face in her hands and lay back on the deckchair and let the sun beat down onto her skin

  “Valerie and Gerry were there too.” Priya said through her fingers after a few minutes. .

  “Well they knew Daniel really well.” Michael swung his legs over the side of his deckchair and sat up. “I wish you didn't have
to see that woman ever again.”

  “It was okay. I was okay. I think what happened on the night of my birthday sort of loosened her hold on me you know.”

  “You still haven't told me what happened that night.”

  “And I still don't want to talk about it. Michael, I couldn’t bear to see the look in your eyes. I know you think I shouldn’t feel guilty about what happened, but I can’t help it.”

  “And when are you going to talk about what happened with Kathy?”

  Priya remained silent.

  “You know Priya you're going to have to deal with this stuff. You’ve had a bad few years. And it all started with that bitch Valerie Helion or Lynch or whatever she is!”

  “Talking about it is not going to bring Kathy back, or my mom for that matter,” she said. “I'm not asking for help. I'm just trying to get through without hurting anybody.”

  “You mean, without letting yourself get hurt. You won’t let anyone close now. For Christ’s sake, Priya, you won’t even get a dog! You’re crazy about animals, in fact, you’re the craziest person I know when it comes to animals, but you won’t get a dog in case something happens to it.”

  “I've just come back from my boss's funeral and it's just been a week since I discovered his dead body, I’ve got his crazy mother searching for a woman in his bed, his crazier sister thinking I screwed him to death and you're giving me a lecture about dogs?”

  “I’m sorry, I know, it’s just been driving me crazy, especially for the last year, what you’re doing to yourself. And this is just like you now. What happened to the Priya I knew, who’d stand up for herself, who’d take on anybody anywhere, who, God forbid, would be in a relationship? Who wanted a family?”

  “You mean the one who thought everything in life was black and white till she got drowned in grey? Michael, I can’t talk about it, not yet. Why can’t you understand that I just want to get on with my life? Without thinking about what happened. You know, hold on to the job, and build some sort of career. Have you noticed how many people are losing their jobs? I can’t afford that. I’ve now got a mortgage, Michael, I can’t lose this house, it’s the only thing I’ve got now, the only place left to call home.”