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Soulmate: Chapter 3

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Conor Keane wiped the sweat dripping into his eyes on the sleeve of his dark brown tracksuit. It was his last circuit of the village green, and his legs were feeling as if they had lead weights attached to them. The sun was at his back, and where his shirt clung to him, the skin has starting to itch.

Pumping his arms harder, he found the strength to sprint across the last few hundred yards of grass and across the road into The White Hart's car park, before slowing to a jog. His right leg was hurting from a missed stride. Earlier he'd been distracted by a crazy driver in a battered red Mini.

"Stop that slacking! You'll need to be fighting fit for Saturday. Little Norton's just recruited a new winger and he's bloody quick, he is!"

Conor waved to Reg, who was collecting an empty pint glass and a full glass of white wine from one of the few empty picnic tables. The beer garden was filling up fast with thirsty customers.

So he had a new opposite number on the Little Norton side. That would spice the game up a bit.

"The usual, please, Reg," Conor puffed back, noting that even the landlord's bald head was shining with perspiration on this warm day. "I'll be back in two ticks."

He darted between the tables, then swung himself over the stile and into the woods, taking the short cut home to his cottage.

It was here that he felt closest to Bridget. Whenever a song failed to come to her within the confines of their cottage, she invariably grabbed her guitar and disappeared through the gap in the fence at the bottom of the garden. Sometimes she was gone for hours. Bridget had fiercely guarded her privacy, so he never went looking for her. Instead he'd found things to do, to busy his hands, menial things around the house, and DIY jobs. He'd become embarrassingly good at cleaning, washing and ironing - and very good at lying to his friends, who were mostly rugby cronies, about how the mysteriously tidy state of their home was down to Mrs Maire Mulligan, an old crone and fellow County Kerry compatriot.

His tales of Mrs Mulligan had all started out as a good bit of craic one night in the pub, but his friends had swallowed his stories as quickly as their ale. Bridget, one of life's terminally untidy people, had gleefully added to the fabrication and, before long, the Keanes' housekeeper was the stuff of legend. With Bridget gone, there'd been no point in keeping Mrs Mulligan on. The old crone had packed her fictitious bags and jigged back into the depths of Conor's fertile imagination just less than a year ago.

But now Bridget was back. Well, they were corresponding anyway. Her latest card, the fourth, had arrived only just this morning and, having translated it from Gaelic, Conor was now struggling to understand what it meant. All of her previous cards had posed riddles too, but the first card had been the easiest - though the most shocking - to interpret. It pictured a scenic ridge in Wiltshire, above Longleat House, that they'd visited once together soon after making their home in Buckstowe. The ridge was called Heaven's Gate.

As he turned the message on the latest postcard over in his head, he rounded a curve in the path through a thick patch of gorse and nearly tripped over a body.

"Jesus, Mary and Judas!" he exclaimed, frantically sidestepping. A bramble pierced his calf through his tracksuit.