When Your Eyes Close: A psychological thriller unlike anything you’ve read before!. Tanya Farrelly

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       CHAPTER TWO

       Caitlin

      Caitlin Davis closed the door behind her with a mixture of anxiety and relief. She knew what the evening held, but getting through the day until she’d arrived at this moment had been hard. Several times during the afternoon she’d found herself drifting despite the mayhem of the office and the decisions that needed to be made as to what should appear in the next issue of New Woman, the magazine she’d founded almost six years before – the same year she’d met David.

      Caitlin threw her handbag down on the bed, sat down and kicked off her shoes. In her stockinged feet she stood on the edge of the bed and removed a box from the top shelf of the wardrobe. Carefully, she climbed down, took the lid off and took out the bundle of photos that lay at the top. David. It was a year today since she’d last seen him. A year since that terrible night when she’d called their friend, Andy, frantic, to tell him he hadn’t come home.

      Walking through Dublin city centre that afternoon, everything had reminded her of their time together. She’d passed restaurants where they’d eaten, pubs where they’d gone with friends – places that she’d found it impossible to enter since he’d disappeared. In the days, weeks and months of the last year, every man of his height and build had drawn her attention. Every corner she’d turned she’d expected to see him, and each evening when she’d put her key in the lock it was with a sense of dread at the emptiness ahead.

      Caitlin picked up a framed photo and allowed herself to feel the ache that his absence had caused – an ache that she tried to quell by keeping busy, but there was nothing that would make her forget. The void that David had left would always be there – and it was only today – on the anniversary of his disappearance, that she would allow herself to be consumed by the total agony of that absence.

      She stared at the picture, taking in his smile, the creases at the corners of his grey eyes, the way he had her wrapped tight, both arms around her. God, they’d been so happy together. She’d loved him so much. There was no way she would ever have let something come between them. What happened had been unprecedented. Another person might have collapsed under it. But she’d experienced pain before and had survived. So instead, she’d done the only thing she could do; summoned all her strength and carried on. No matter what it cost her.

      She put the picture to her lips, stood it on the bedside locker and lay back on the bed. For the millionth time, she thought of all that had happened that night, of how dismissive the guards had been when she and Andy had gone to the station to report David missing. They’d buzzed the bell at the desk, waited a good ten minutes before the garda on duty appeared. He’d then taken them through to one of the interview rooms, sat there and, disinterestedly, taken notes. He’d told them that nobody was officially a missing person until the mandatory twenty-four-hour period had elapsed. ‘You don’t understand, David would never do this …’ she’d said. She’d broken down in tears then as Andy explained how David was supposed to meet him that evening and had failed to turn up. He tried to impress on the garda how completely out of character that was for his friend.

      They’d taken it more seriously in the days that followed. They’d questioned Caitlin in detail, asked her about David’s behaviour leading up to his disappearance. Had he been acting in any way strange? Had he ever done this type of thing before? How had his mood been in recent weeks? She’d told them that no, there had been no warning, nothing that would have set off alarm bells. As far as she had been concerned everything was fine.

      And how was the marriage, they wanted to know: had they been experiencing any difficulties? Perhaps they’d argued? She’d thought of the years they’d been together; they’d hardly ever argued. And, on the rare occasion when she got annoyed, he’d make some joke to make her come around. David was like that; quick-witted and hard to resist. He was also the most stable person she’d known, a foil to her own sudden moods.

      She’d gone through the details with them again and again, told them that he’d left for work that morning as normal. He was a music teacher at a secondary school for boys. The school principal had verified that David had turned up for work at 8.30 a.m. as usual and that he’d left at 4 p.m. that afternoon. CCTV footage showed him putting his violin case in the boot of the car before getting in and exiting the school car park.

      The police had carried out door-to-door enquiries, establishing that nobody had seen David return to the house that afternoon. His car had been located clamped in a backstreet in the city centre. A place where, unfortunately, there were no cameras. A ticket in the windscreen showed that he’d paid to park until 5.30 p.m., and an assistant in a music shop in George’s Street said that David had been in the store at about 5 p.m. and had bought violin strings. His violin had still been in the boot – one string broken, explaining his purchase. The information given by the music shop assistant had been the last reported sighting.

      David’s picture had gone up all over the city, on billboards, in DART and СКАЧАТЬ