The Half Truth(55)

She followed his gaze. Pavel was sitting in a car, the engine running, beckoning to Sasha.

‘Meet me again,’ said Sasha urgently. He kissed her on the forehead. ‘I will contact you.’

Tina stood and watched as he ran across the grass strip, hop over the wall and jump into the waiting car.

As the car disappeared out of view, swallowed up by the traffic, Tina turned and looked out to sea.

She felt numb. Shell-shocked. Confused. Broken. Betrayed.

She had no concept of time. No idea how long she stood there for. She was vaguely aware of the tide drawing in and the coastal breeze picking up as high tide peaked.

A touch on her arm brought her back from her thoughts.

‘Tina.’

She didn’t move. She didn’t turn. She knew who it was.





Chapter 28


‘Tina,’ he said her name again, this time louder. She remained impassive, almost in a trance, looking out at the horizon.

John and the team had driven straight over to Brighton. It was more than a hunch. John knew she had come to meet Sasha. The atmosphere in the car had been tense. Neither John nor Martin spoke as they travelled to the destination, the 4x4 in its familiar position in their rear-view mirror.

Sweeping up and down Brighton seafront in their vehicles, on the prowl for their prey, they had missed him. As John and Martin had cruised along, scanning the faces of the crowd, the people had thinned out and that’s when he had spotted her.

A lone figure, standing still as the people trickled past her. The wind had picked up and was lifting the ends of her hair, cocoa-bean-coloured strands of hair floating up and down, caressing her face and shoulders.

‘You lied to me,’ she said, still not turning.

‘I wanted to tell you, but I couldn’t,’ he said. ‘It could have compromised the operation.’

‘Is that all you care about?’ she turned to look at him. ‘The operation. I thought you cared about me. Obviously, not as much as I thought.’

‘I do care about you,’ said John, ‘but I also care about the death of Neil Edwards.’

‘What about the death of my husband? You know, the death that never happened. I suppose you knew about that too.’

‘That came as a surprise to me too,’ said John, the guilt for both his deception to Tina and his loyalty to Neil fighting for pole position. ‘And that’s the truth.’

‘The truth. Dear God! Don’t speak to me about the truth,’ she shrugged off his hand. ‘Your life, your job, brings you into so much contact with lies and deceit that I think you don’t know where one ends and the other begins. You’re surrounded by it all day and at some point it seeped into your soul. You tell lies like some people breathe.’

She brushed past him and began walking back towards the pier.

‘Tina, wait.’ He ran after her.

She didn’t break stride, her eyes once again fixed firmly in front of her. ‘The bottom line is, John,’ she said. ‘You lied to me.’

‘And you’ve been totally honest with me?’ he said, his own indignation surfacing. She stopped and looked at him as he continued. ‘We all tell lies. We all keep things to ourselves for our own personal reasons. I’m not the only guilty one here. Think about it.’

‘Some lies are bigger than others,’ she said.

‘They are still lies. Whatever the size.’ He was being pedantic, he knew, but morally he was right. She couldn’t argue with what he was saying.

He watched her shoulders sag. She looked down at her feet and when she looked back at him there were tears shining in her eyes.

‘All these years I’ve grieved for Sasha, the pain of losing the love of my life, the father of my son, has at times been almost too much to bear. I thought I had lost someone who loved me as much as I loved them. I thought I had experienced the most painful thing possible.’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘I was wrong. This is worse.’

She swayed. John drew her to him. He felt her knees give. He held her tight.

Eventually, she pulled away from his hold, the strength returning to her body and her mind.

‘I need to pick Dimitri up from my parents.’ Rummaging in her bag and pulling out a tissue, she wiped at her eyes.

Referring to herself only wasn’t wasted on John. She was distancing herself from him. He couldn’t blame her. This understanding didn’t mask the stab of the rejection which sliced through him.

‘Come on, I’ll take you home,’ he said. There were more truths he needed to tell her. She had more pain to come. He had more confessions to make.

John listened to the soft tones of Tina reading Dimitri a bedtime story. Her voice drifted down the stairs and into the living room like a clement breeze, the pain of what happened earlier, hidden from her son.