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Tom shook his head despondently. “I did my best to try to persuade him to tell Clare. He needed her support, but he wouldn’t tell her. He kept saying that he didn’t want to burden her or the kids. At home he was carrying on as if everything was normal.
    “I said I’d go to the doctor’s with him, see if he could get some antidepressants, but Martin wasn’t having any of it. He insisted that he’d snap out of it, be back to his old self soon. I was feeling completely out of my depth. I really needed to tell someone, to get him some help, but he made me promise to keep his condition to myself. So I didn’t tell Clare, but I kept an eye on him, took him out for drinks, sat and listened, but I still didn’t get to the bottom of what was bothering him.”
    “And can you tell us what you know about what happened on the day of Martin Wilson’s death?” the coroner asked.
    “Yes, okay.” Tom braced himself and began. “On the day…the day it happened, I was up in Glasgow on business. I’d only been there a couple of hours. I’d already had a business meeting and I was en route to check in to my hotel when Marty phoned me – it must have been about one o’clock. He wanted to let me know that one of the shipments of cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast had docked early – it wasn’t due for another couple of days and the GPS system hadn’t been tracking it, so it caught us by surprise.
    “Anyway, Marty had gone ahead and got the lads to unload it into the warehouse – I could always rely on him to deal with things when I wasn’t there; he was a fantastic foreman. I thanked him and was about to put the phone down but he seemed to hesitate, so I asked him if there was anything else he needed to tell me and then, out of the blue, he started this…this outpouring ; telling me what a great mate I’d been to him and how much he loved Clare and the kids, and then he started to cry… It was terrible. I could hear him down the phone, weeping like a child. I didn’t know what to do, what to say, so I just ended up saying something useless, like, ‘Everything’s going to be all right, Marty.’ I told him he had to ring Clare, let her know how he was feeling. I told him that I’d be back from Glasgow the next day and we could have a good talk. I said to send the lads home and shut up the warehouse early. We didn’t have any deliveries going out and he sounded in no state to work and, to be honest, I never trusted anyone else to run the place.
    “Then he seemed to pull himself together. I could hear he’d stopped crying. He just said, ‘Don’t worry about me – I’ll be fine. Thanks for everything, Tom,’ and hung up. That’s the last time I ever spoke to him.” Tom’s voice trailed off. He looked over at Gina, who was shaking her head vigorously, her lips pursed in protest.
    “I’m so sorry, Gina,” Tom said gently.
    Gina had been listening to his evidence with mounting anger. She couldn’t believe what he was saying. Without thinking, she was suddenly out of her seat, shouting at him. “No way! My dad wasn’t depressed. I would have known if he’d been depressed.”
    “Gina, if you wish, you will have a chance to question the witness after I’ve finished,” the coroner said. He started leafing through the papers in front of him.
    “Gina, listen to me,” her mother whispered. “It’s true. Tom’s told me all about it. Your dad kept it hidden from us. He didn’t want to worry us. Isn’t that typical of him? Doesn’t that sound just like your dad, to put us before himself?”
    “How can you believe that?” Gina hissed. “He couldn’t have kept it from us. He was my dad – your husband!”
    “I know it’s hard, Gina, but it makes sense. Why else would he have done this? People can hide their true feelings. Please don’t go making things more painful than they already are. Come on, love, sit back down.”
    Gina looked at her mother’s distressed face and reluctantly took her seat,