“Why me?”
“He said you had been anxious about the IVF results.”
“Well, it wasn’t me. The last time I spoke to him was when he left for Filey.”
Kim looked vexed by my total lack of information and exhaled dramatically.
“I don’t know then. The only thing I’m certain of is that he didn’t slip, let alone fall. He was stone-cold sober when he left Steve’s house. There’s only one explanation in my eyes.”
“What?”
“He stepped off the Brigg intentionally.”
Kim genuinely believed Harry had done away with himself. Is that what everyone secretly thought? As selfish as it may sound, the first thought that sprang to mind was that she was implying he wasn’t happy with me, or we had marriage issues. I refused to believe that my husband would take his own life. He never had a suicidal thought in his life, even after everything he had been through with his family. Harry was tough as nails and resilient, which were some of the qualities that attracted me to him in the first place. The mere suggestion that people thought he would end his own life was so insulting to me. It almost insinuated that I had something to do with that decision. I couldn’t afford to have her spreading this around, and I immediately needed to correct her.
“He did not step off the Brigg. He wouldn’t do that. We were starting a family,” I shouted.
“Okay. I’m sorry. But he wasn’t drunk enough to fall, so something else must have happened,” Kim asserted.
“He didn’t commit suicide, Kim,” I insisted.
“Okay. But something else happened that night. Even if he were drunk, Harry could manage his drink better than any of us.”
“So, what do you think happened?”
“What about money issues?”
“No. We’ve never had any issues with our finances.”
“Are you sure?”
Harry worked as a financial advisor back in Filey, but when we moved to Manchester, he managed to get a much higher-paying job as an investment specialist. He was making more money than he had ever earned in his life. He was only there for about a week before he died, but the signing bonus alone was quite vast. There was no way that we had hidden money troubles. My part-time job at the pharmacy didn’t contribute much, and Harry told me not to worry about it; he would provide for everything else. If we were in some kind of financial hardship, he was a dab hand at concealing them well. We’d just bought our dream house, and we were both driving brand-new cars around. Harry never seemed to be worried about going out for a meal or whenever we needed to buy something big. If anything, he seemed to have an endless supply of cash. But I was starting to presume that maybe Harry may not have been entirely truthful with me throughout our marriage. I hated white lies, and it seemed our relationship was plagued by them. Did he think I was so emotionally fragile that he felt the need to constantly shelter me from the truth?
That being said, I rarely got involved in our finances. Harry would often ask my opinion on things, but because of his profession and education, I largely left it to him. It sounded out of character for Harry to stretch us so thinly that it would leave us with money problems, but it would explain a lot. I thought the house we had bought was way out of budget, and when I saw him write the offer down, I went weak in the knees. But it all went through, so he acquired the money from somewhere. It never occurred to me to ask him where from.
“No, I’m not sure. What do you know?” I asked defeatedly.
“I overheard him telling Steve he owes money out to some bad people. Some brothers from Leeds,” Kim said.
“He never said anything about that.”
“I think he was embarrassed by it.”
I couldn’t take it any longer. A putrid mixture of shame and anxiety forcefully gurgled up my throat forcefully. I’d had panic attacks before, and I could feel a strong one coming. It started with a prickly sensation moving up and down the back of my neck, not alarming at first but growing in strength with each second. My heart lost all its rhythm; each beat was erratic and vicious, and my chest started to ache with every thump. Seconds later, my lungs started to falter, and my breathing became laboured and shallow. I fumbled in my bag for the tablets, but I’d lost all sensation in my fingertips. I could barely remove the cap from the bottle. Kim was looking at me with extreme concern, like I was some kind of drug-addled maniac. But I didn’t care. I just needed the drugs in my system as soon as possible to mitigate what was happening to me. A thousand thoughts and questions aggressively collided with one another aggressively in my mind, and I still couldn’t make head nor tail of them. I’d bitten off more than my mounting anxiety could chew, and Kim’s revelations had pushed me over the edge. I placed two of the pills in my mouth and grabbed Kim’s drink to wash them down with. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, as the doctor had taught me, and slowly, the sensations started to subside. When I opened my eyes again, Kim was half standing from her seat, not knowing what to do to help me. I rubbed my temples and exhaled.
“Are you all right?” Kim asked worriedly.
“I suffer from panic attacks,” I confessed embarrassingly.
“Do I need to get help?”
“The tablets help. They are called Alprazolam; they are for anxiety attacks.”
“I’m so sorry about all this, Amelia. It cannot be easy hearing all this, especially from a stranger, but you deserve to know.”
“It’s fine. Anything triggers them these days.”
“Take my number down, just in case you need help with anything.”
Kim unlocked her phone and showed me the screen. It had her number on it. I typed the number into my phone and rang her briefly so she had mine. I locked my phone and resumed eye contact with Kim. She had this look of pity across her face, and I hated being on the receiving end of it. Objectively, I could see why Harry remained friends with her; she obviously worked very hard to appear to be a really nice person, and I hated her for it. I needed to keep her close, though. Her insight would be invaluable in finding out what everyone knew about Harry’s death. But I couldn’t bear to sit with her any longer, and I needed to go home and sleep off the migraine that was brewing in my head.
“I need to go,” I said offhandedly.
“Okay. If you need to talk, honestly, don’t hesitate to get in touch.”
“I won’t. Thank you.”
I stepped out of the bar, and I felt like the last hour was a fever dream. Just hearing someone else say all these things about Harry was enough to make me feel ill. Every fibre of my being needed to know what happened to him up on the Brigg; I wouldn’t be able to rest until I did. Part of me wondered if he actually stepped off the cliff face purposefully, but I carried on telling myself that he didn’t. He wouldn’t do that to me, would he?
I walked back home like I was in a trance. The bright lights of the city and the passing cars blurred my vision as I barely even paid any attention to where I was heading. The hours following a panic attack were as bad as the attack itself. The skull-splitting headache was the worst complaint, followed closely by persistent nausea. I was in constant fear that it would return; just the fear of the panic attack itself was enough to induce one. The dizziness subsided by the time I’d got back home, but the anxiety was there to stay. My phone vibrated as I unlocked the front door; I knew who it would be.
I can see you are one step closer to finding out the truth.
Where do we go from here?
I see you will meet two men who will bring you closer to what really happened. But tread softly. They are dangerous.
The brothers from Leeds?
