Before We Met: A Novel (36 page)

‘What is it?’

‘Well, that’s it,’ said Mrs Reilly. ‘When I found it hidden like that, I thought it must be something important or . . . embarrassing.’ She cast a quick glance in the direction of one of the well-endowed ladies on the wall. ‘But it’s not. It’s just pictures, pages torn out of magazines and the like.’ She opened the box and lifted a slim bundle of papers out on to the desk. ‘Look.’ She slid it across.

On top, Hannah saw, its paper brittle now more than twenty years later, was an advert for aftershave, one of the exclusive small-batch types only for sale at Harrods or Harvey Nicks. The black-and-white picture showed a woman in a white silk dress standing barefoot on the deck of a beautiful wooden yacht. The same breeze that wrinkled the water lifted her long hair away from the smooth length of her back. A square-jawed man was emerging from the cabin with a couple of drinks and a knowing smile. The mood was romantic, cheesy, and utterly aspirational. Wear this aftershave, the picture said, and this life will be yours: the gorgeous, aloof woman; the antique yacht; sundowners on the Riviera.

Turning over, Hannah found a piece that she guessed had been torn from an interiors magazine showing an amazing glass house – laughably referred to as a summer cabin – on a island off the coast of Norway. Next was a yellowing
Sunday Times
review of a restaurant in Bruges with pictures of a spectacular dining room, and then an interview with the family who ran La Colombe d’Or hotel in St-Paul-de-Vence – with a jolt, Hannah remembered Mark talking about it only a month or so ago, saying he’d always wanted to go. There were pictures of a London townhouse not dissimilar to the one in Quarrendon Street – the kitchen in particular was very like theirs, with a slate floor and long farmhouse table – and a huge apartment in the Dakota Building with views of Central Park. Near the bottom of the pile was a run of pages with pictures of an old Jaguar XJS, and then, the final sheet, a Knight Frank advertisement, like the ones she saw in back issues of
Country Life
at the dentist, for an eight-bedroomed Tudor house in Gloucestershire, complete with walled gardens and a tennis court.

‘Expensive tastes even as a teenager,’ said Mrs Reilly at her shoulder. ‘It’s lucky he turned out to be so successful, isn’t it?’

Hannah had a sudden memory of the first night on the beach at Montauk with Mark, their conversation about living in New York. ‘I used to sit in my bedroom at home,’ he’d said, ‘devising ways I could make it happen.’ There was nothing lucky about it, she thought; he’d made sure he was successful.
The boring, ordinary,
petit bourgeois
people he had to leave behind
.

Mrs Reilly was looking at her. To hide her face, Hannah went to the window. Like the area at the front of the house, the garden was mostly lawn, a narrow stretch of twenty-five or thirty metres extending to a flimsy panelled fence, interrupted only by a cheap wooden bird-table. The hail hammered down on a skirt of crazy paving around the house. Just beyond the fence that divided their garden from their neighbour’s, she could see the pitched roof of a small garden shed.

‘It must have been very hard for you,’ she said, trying to sound non-committal.

‘The trial?’ said Mrs Reilly.

‘Yes, but even before that. Mark’s told me what Nick was like as a teenager, how wild he was.’

‘He was a handful,’ she agreed, nodding.

‘It sounds like it was a little more than that.’

Mrs Reilly frowned. ‘He was badly behaved when it came to girls, yes, I have to admit, and beyond a certain age, it was a struggle to get him to go to school, but otherwise . . .’

Hannah looked at the shed. ‘What about Jim Thomas?’ she said. ‘Your old neighbour.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t Nick who didn’t get on with Jim,’ said Mrs Reilly brightly. ‘That was Mark.’

Hannah felt the cold sensation on the back of her neck. ‘But the fire in his shed on the allotment?’ she said. ‘And what happened to his dog.’

‘The fire was an accident.’ Mrs Reilly picked up the pile of papers and dropped them smartly back into the box-file. ‘They’d been smoking in there to annoy Jim – that was bad of them, I know – and they hadn’t put a cigarette out properly. We paid to replace the shed – Jim ended up better off, I should think. The old one was quite shabby and . . .’

‘His dog?’ Hannah pressed.

Mrs Reilly’s face tightened. ‘That whole thing was . . . a misunderstanding. They just found Molly. They didn’t have anything to do with her drowning.’

At the door Mr Reilly gave Hannah a hard look. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said. ‘Why did you come here?’

She looked him in the eye as a volley of hail hit the patterned glass behind her. She couldn’t tell him the truth: it would devastate Mrs Reilly to know what Mark had said. ‘Because I was curious,’ she said. ‘You’re my husband’s parents and I’d never met you.’

He stared back but the answer seemed to have enough of the truth in it to satisfy him. ‘He told you we were . . . estranged?’

‘Estranged. Yes.’

‘And the timing? I don’t believe this has nothing to do with what’s just happened. You’ve been married and living in London for months and we’ve never heard of you, and now Nick’s out of prison, suddenly you’re on our doorstep.’

‘Okay,’ Hannah said evenly. ‘Yes, I’ll admit that there’s a connection. I wanted to know about Nick.’ She made herself hold eye contact. ‘Mark doesn’t talk about his brother, won’t – I found out about Patty Hendrick purely by chance. And now another woman’s dead and the police are on
our
doorstep and I don’t know anything about him.’

‘He’s a killer,’ Mr Reilly told Hannah, and next to him, Elizabeth flinched. ‘What more do you need to know? He’s a killer and we’re a killer’s parents.’

Hannah slammed the car door, put her seatbelt on and programmed the GPS to ‘Home’. Then she stopped. Where was she actually going to go tonight?

She rested her forehead on the top of the steering wheel. With a sudden burst of longing she thought about her life in New York – her friends, her apartment, her job – she hadn’t realised it at the time, of course, but everything had been so simple then. She saw her office with its huge glass desk and haphazard piles of papers and books and magazines; the view of the Empire State Building from the corridor just outside. Her assistant, Flynn, with his so-ugly-it’s-got-to-be-cool wardrobe and lengthy oral reviews of whatever pop-up restaurant had opened in Greenpoint over the weekend. She’d moaned to Roisin sometimes about the weeks that passed in a blur of work but, right now, she’d give anything to be back there, strung out on coffee, pulling an all-nighter; to wake up in the apartment on Waverly and find that this whole situation –
Even Mark
? said the voice.
Your marriage?
– was just a Bobby Ewing-style alternative storyline, a nightmare.

The wind threw another stinging rash of hail against the windscreen and Hannah had a new thought. Slowly she raised her head from the wheel. If their parents weren’t dead, then where the hell had Nick got a quarter of a million pounds? Mark had said it was his share of their parents’ estate, money from the sale of the house, but it couldn’t have been, could it? Their house was right here – they were in it.

She tried to think. Nick hadn’t earned that money himself, that was for sure, not by legitimate means, anyway: the newspapers had backed Mark up on that point, talking about his inability to hold down a job and how he’d taken hand-outs from his mother to pay the rent on his flat in Borough. Unless Mark had paid him a huge bonus at some point – and that seemed very unlikely – the only way Nick could have had that sort of money was if he’d been into something illegal. Hannah felt a wave of pure exhaustion: at this point, she thought, she wouldn’t be surprised if she found out there was no money involved at all.

‘Oh, it wasn’t Nick who didn’t get on with Jim’
– she heard Mrs Reilly’s bright tone and deliberately blotted it from her mind. No, not yet; she wasn’t ready.

Getting out her phone, she sent Tom a text:
Can I stay with you tonight? In the car now but will explain when I see you. Really need to talk
.

She put the phone on the passenger seat where she could see it and turned on the engine. The car had grown cold while she’d been inside and her breath had fogged up the glass. The chamois-leather sponge she kept for the purpose had rolled into the footwell on the other side and she undid her seatbelt and reached for it. She was straining, her hand almost on it, when there was a sharp rap behind her. Jerking upright, she saw Elizabeth Reilly’s desperate face pressed against the glass. Hannah’s nerves were so jangled, she shrieked in alarm.

She rolled down the window. Mark’s mother had left the house in a hurry, it seemed: she hadn’t put her coat on but was holding it over her head like a shield. She pulled it forward now to protect her eyes from the hail bouncing off the car roof.

‘I know you need to go,’ she said, voice nearly drowned out by the radio-static noise of it, ‘but I had to try . . . I shouldn’t ask you, put you in a difficult position like this, but . . . can you help us? Me – it’s just me. Gordon doesn’t want to see him, he’s too angry, but I . . . I miss my son.’ She started to cry.

Over her shoulder, Hannah saw Mark’s father standing on the doorstep, watching. ‘Mrs Reilly,’ she said, ‘you’re getting soaked. Why don’t you get in? We can talk in here, in the dry.’

She shook her head vehemently. ‘No, I can’t – Gordon . . . Look, I don’t care if he looks down on us,’ Elizabeth said, ‘Mark, I mean. Whatever Gordon says,
I
don’t care. I’m sixty-eight; I haven’t seen my son for ten years. I just don’t want to die without seeing him again.’ She looked Hannah in the eye, begging her.

Water was coursing down the gutter, bubbling into a drain somewhere underneath the car. The shoulders of her cardigan were soaked through.

‘I’m not asking for a miracle,’ she said. ‘I know nothing’s going to make it right. But if you could try – if you could ask him if he’d see me, just once. He doesn’t have to come here – I can come to him, to London, anywhere. I’ll find a way.’

Hannah reached through the window and touched her forearm, felt the bone even through the cardigan and the sleeve of the blouse underneath. ‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘I can’t promise anything but—’

‘Thank you. Oh, thank you.’ To Hannah’s surprise, Mark’s mother ducked her head through the window and kissed her quickly on the cheek. ‘You don’t know what that means.’

‘Elizabeth!’ Gordon’s voice over the noise of the hail. ‘Come inside – you’ll catch your death.’

Chapter Twenty-four

The food court of the service station rang with voices, mobiles, the clatter of trays and cutlery. Two babies were wailing in concert. Hands shaking, Hannah ripped open the pack of sandwiches. She hadn’t wanted to stop but she hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast and she was losing her ability to focus. Five or six miles back, she’d gone to overtake and nearly been ploughed off the road. She hadn’t even seen the other car before she’d pulled out.

The sandwich was stale but she finished it and drank a bitter double espresso before checking her phone again. Every few minutes since Eastbourne, she’d been flicking her eyes over to the passenger seat, but the red light had refused to flash. Now, thank God, Tom had replied:
Of course you can stay. In now and will be all night
.

She tapped out a quick response and put the phone back on the table. Almost immediately, it started flashing again.
Where are you?
said the subject line.

Not her brother this time but Mark.

Her heart thumped heavily. Did he suspect something – or know? Could his parents have contacted him? She clicked on the message and saw the rest:
Did you meet up with Tom in the end?
She sat back, breathing out. She’d forgotten to let him know what she was doing for the day; that was all. She thought for a moment then wrote a reply:
Sorry, yes, with T&L. Sara, old Malvern friend, coming for dinner – might stay if you don’t mind? Haven’t seen her for years.
She read it through then sent it. The lie was cowardly but so what? What was one tiny lie compared to all his huge ones? She’d send another text later to say she’d had too much wine and was going to stay the night.

She put the phone back in her bag and made her way outside. A few miles from Eastbourne, the hail had been succeeded by a heavy rain that thundered on her umbrella now as she ran back to the car. Cloud had blotted the light from the sky leaving only an angry crimson line behind the row of scrappy pines that edged the car park. The clock on the dashboard said quarter to six.

The motorway was even busier, people driving into London for Saturday night. Ahead, tail lights wove back and forth across the lanes, tens of red eyes in the dark. She stayed as far back as she could from the lorries that thundered past with their sides billowing, water spinning off their tyres in great arcs.

She’d gone ten or twelve miles when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw her phone light up. Mark, she thought, but when she reached across to the passenger seat to check, Neesha’s name was on the screen. Neesha – in all the confusion about the Audi and Mark’s parents, she had forgotten she’d called her.