The Soulmate(13)

‘What happened next?’ Tamil asks.

‘I approached her,’ Gabe says. ‘And I asked if she needed help with anything.’

‘Did she reply?’

‘She turned around. She was clearly upset. She might have been crying.’

A powerful gust of wind cuts through us. One of the legs of the police tent comes free and a couple of officers quickly pin it down. We all look at it for a moment, then Tamil says: ‘And then?’

‘I asked her if she was all right. She said her husband had been unfaithful and that she didn’t want to live anymore.’

‘Did she mention her husband by name?’

‘No.’

‘And she didn’t give her own name?’

‘No.’

She makes a note on her notepad. ‘What happened next?’

‘She kept talking, but the wind was so loud. I was only getting every second or third word. I moved closer, but the wind was wild, and I didn’t want either of us to get too close to the edge.’

Detective Tamil keeps writing, then flips a page on her notebook and looks up. ‘And then?’

‘And then it happened very quickly. One minute she was facing me, and the next she was facing the edge. I lunged forward to try to grab her but . . .’ He’s overtaken by a wave of emotion that I recognise as real. ‘It was too late.’

Detective Tamil’s gaze jumps to her notebook. ‘Sorry – you said you lunged forward? I didn’t see that in your statement. Did you touch her at any point?’

‘No,’ he says. ‘Well . . . I touched her ponytail. It flew up as she fell. It touched my hand.’

‘I see.’ Tamil makes a note of this. Then she looks up. ‘Can you show me how you lunged? Act it out? Over here.’

Gabe nods, moving across the grass to where she has gestured. ‘She . . . uh . . . started to fall and I . . .’ He steps forward, his arms starting wide and then slowly closing until he’s nearly touching either elbow. Detective Tamil watches him for a second, then she looks back at her notebook.

‘And I understand she screamed?’

Gabe straightens up. ‘Yes. At least I think she did.’

‘At what point did she scream? Before she jumped? During?’

‘During,’ Gabe says. ‘But again, I may have got it wrong. Maybe it was the wind.’

Tamil scribbles some more in her notebook. ‘All right. Is there anything else? Anything she said or did that you haven’t mentioned?’

‘No.’

‘In that case, thank you very much for your time,’ she says, returning her notebook to her pocket.

‘That’s it?’ Gabe says.

‘For now. We’ll be in touch if we need anything else.’ Tamil looks like she’s going to walk back to her colleagues, but she hesitates a moment. ‘I read the article in the local paper. It’s pretty impressive, the number of lives you’ve saved. Focus on that.’

She smiles, then moves off to join her colleagues, who are huddled under the newly fixed tent. The mood feels casual, I notice. A couple of them are talking about where to stop for lunch on the way back to Somerville.

No one suspects Gabe of anything, I realise. I know I should feel relieved by this, yet all I can think about is the position of Gabe’s hands when he acted out the lunge for Tamil, and how it looked nothing like what I’d seen out the window.





10


PIPPA

THEN



‘Pippa? You might not remember me. It’s Gabe Gerard, from the Botanic Gardens?’

It had been three weeks since our ill-fated first meeting. After he failed to call, I’d played out every possible scenario in my head, and eventually decided that my meeting with Gabe, and his subsequent invitation to the wedding reception, had been imagined. It made sense. So much about that meeting had felt strange and otherworldly. And so, when the call finally came, I was genuinely startled.

‘Pippa? Are you there?’

‘I’m here. And I remember.’

Of course I remembered. The man had stopped the rain for me! I’d been thinking about him for three weeks.

Wondering if he’d been horribly drunk and forgotten about our meeting.

If he’d met someone else on the way to the wedding reception and fallen in love.

The entire thing – coming to talk to a crying dog walker during a wedding ceremony and asking her on a date – had been a dare that he never intended to follow through on. (Stopping the rain, I had to concede, was a lucky coincidence.)

Eventually, I’d had to put the whole encounter in the same category as my relationship with Mark: things that I had unwittingly screwed up for reasons that weren’t clear to me.

‘I’m so sorry I haven’t called earlier. But I can explain!’

His excuse, of course, was magnificent. He’d been helping an elderly wedding guest across the road to the reception venue when a car had come around the corner at high speed. Gabe had managed to get the elderly guest to safety but he’d been clipped by the car, breaking his leg in two places. His injuries had required a week’s stay in the hospital (something that was verified later by the groom as well as by the gruesome scar on Gabe’s leg), and the subsequent two weeks had been spent on opiates, falling in and out of sleep and wondering if our initial meeting was something he’d dreamed up – much like I had.