Hannah tipped her head back and let the freezing drizzle fall on her cheeks and eyelids. She pulled in long breaths, willing her heart to stop beating so fast; she could feel it knocking behind her sternum as if she was going to have a heart attack. Another wave of nausea went over her, and she crossed the yard and leaned against the little wrought-iron table, bracing herself with her hands. She was hot then cold then hot again, sweating in her clothes but shivering.
She thought of the crimes she’d imagined on the Tube home – fraud, drugs, even the death by drink-driving – and she wanted to laugh: how tame of her, how naïve. But how could she have imagined anything like this? In one of the other tabloid pieces – she’d barely scratched the surface so far; the story had run for days, it seemed, the papers loving this tale of sex and death amongst the young and glamorous – she’d read descriptions of the look of glee on Nick’s face as he’d emptied another syringe into Patty Hendrick’s limp arm, then angled her body towards his hidden camera as he’d pushed her knees apart again. Glee – the word was sickeningly vivid. Reading it, she’d seen him as clearly as if he’d been crouching over her, Hannah, his eyes hungry, mouth wet and open, his sharp incisors just like Mark’s.
Even without the references to Mark and DataPro, even though she’d never seen a picture of him before, she would have known the man in the photographs as his brother straight away. The pictures were ten years old now but looking at them she’d felt as if she were looking at a younger, better-looking version of Mark, the face a little less broad, the eyes just slightly wider-spaced, the mole on his cheek lasered away without a trace. Mark was an excellent prototype – she’d thought he was handsome from the first time she’d clapped eyes on him on the verandah in Montauk – but Nick, it was clear, was the perfected version.
And Patty had been ‘dating’ Mark. What did ‘dating’ mean in British English? Had they been in a relationship? How long had they been seeing each other? What did it matter, so far as what Nick had done? What kind of person even entertained the idea of a woman his brother was involved with or had even expressed interest in? The kind of person who let his sixty-year-old mother work in a shop to fund his post-college lifestyle, answered the voice at the back of her head. Who showed naked pictures of his girlfriend around school. The kind of person who could watch a woman fight for her life and not ring an ambulance.
Hannah’s stomach gave a sudden heave and she dashed back across the yard and wrenched the door open. She made it to the downstairs lavatory just in time. Afterwards, empty, she closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the cold china rim of the hand basin. That poor woman, she thought, poor, lost Patty. To die like that, drugged out of your mind, filmed naked, alone with a leering, conscienceless horror of a man who’d stand by and watch you die rather than deal with the consequences of calling for help.
The papers had had several different pictures of her and, if the Internet page layouts were anything to go by, they’d printed them big. No surprise there: she was perfect for that kind of story, any kind of story, with her long straight blonde hair and wide green eyes that at first glance seemed innocent but then revealed a glint of invitation. She was slim but curvaceous, still young enough at twenty-five that the curves suggested puppy fat in the best of ways, a toothsome, almost succulent plumpness. Two of the most frequently featured photographs looked as if they’d been taken on the same night and showed her in a simple black dress with cap sleeves that she’d pulled in at the waist with a thick patent-leather belt whose studs and heavy double buckle were perfect visual shorthand for what she’d been into the weekend she died, if not ever before.
Hannah thought about the photograph Mark had described but never shown her, the one of him and his brother as boys on the beach in Devon: Nick the golden child, Mark with his wasp sting and too-tight trunks, his ice-cream cone dropped in the sand. She imagined him in the club that night, coming back from the bar carrying a drink for Patty to discover that she’d left with his brother, and she felt a rush of pity for him, an intense, bitter sadness. In seconds, however, it was gone, replaced by anger. How could he not have told her? This was so huge, so fundamental. Something like this must be scored into his psyche; a day couldn’t pass when he didn’t think about it. What kind of a wife was she to him that he’d never told her – that he’d left her to find out like this from a friend she’d never even heard of?
But then, why hadn’t she found out for herself until now? How could this exist in Mark’s past without her knowing? Well, how hard, accused the voice in her head, did you try to find out about him when you met? Yes, they’d met through Ant and Roisin but they themselves had only known him a few weeks by then. She had met a man in a foreign country, without any of the normal infrastructure that surrounded people: family, old friends. Mark’s parents were dead, his brother estranged – she’d had none of the usual references. Teenage girls, she thought savagely, did more research into their crushes than she’d done into her husband – an hour on the Internet and she would have found all of this. She’d started once, googling him at the office one night when she was waiting for a call from LA, but after the first few links she had stopped, feeling grubby and stalkerish as she’d read pieces in the business press about his success, the big contracts DataPro had been getting then. All the talk of money had made her feel like a gold-digger, as if she was sizing him up as a catch, a potential target.
It hadn’t just been that, though. As she’d finished one story and clicked on the next, she’d been ambushed by a memory from her childhood. It had been spring, March – what happened in the weeks afterwards meant she’d never forget – and she was nine years old. She’d been upstairs in her bedroom doing her homework and she’d come down for a glass of milk and, if she was lucky and the kitchen was clear, a raid of the biscuit tin. Just as she’d been about to round the kitchen door, however, she’d seen her mother.
Something she’d never been able to put her finger on – the atmosphere, a radiating tension in the air, perhaps – had stopped Hannah in her tracks and she’d stayed back, out of sight. Her mother had been putting a load of washing on, sorting it before it went in the machine, and Hannah had watched as she’d gone through her father’s trouser pockets, pulling them all the way so they stuck out like cartoon ears, shaking the trousers as if she could force them to talk to her. She’d been crying, the sobs silent but strong enough to wrack the whole of her upper body.
Hannah had been physically repulsed. Why was her mother doing this? Did she want to destroy their family, to drive Dad away? Couldn’t she see what she was doing? She was making his life unlivable, a nightmare. Nearly every night Hannah could hear their voices on the other side of the bedroom wall, her mother’s desperate pleading that he just tell her the truth, her father’s increasing frustration, his growing anger at her insistence that he was lying. Her mother was like a rat, Hannah thought as she stood at the kitchen door and watched, a rat gnawing and gnawing, eating away at their family.
Without letting her mother know she’d been seen, Hannah had run upstairs to her room, slammed the door and jammed the lock with her hairbrush. Then she’d flung herself face down on the bed and cried and cried. It was hopeless; there was no way her parents could stay together. Her dad would move out and there would be a divorce and she and Tom would be like her friend Claire from school, who lived out of a bag and felt guilty all the time for being excited about Friday nights when she finally got to see her dad.
Lying on her bed that night, Hannah had made a promise to herself: she would never creep around like that, spying on the people she was supposed to love. She would never do it. If she ever got married, she would trust her husband. Well, she’d kept her promise, hadn’t she? she thought bitterly now. And look at the results.
Legs shaking, she stood up and washed her hands and face. Pink eyes stared back at her from the mirror, any benefit from the long sleep on the sofa last night wiped out. That felt like weeks ago. She dried her hands and went back to the kitche
n, poured herself another half-inch of Armagnac and sat down at the table. The red light was flashing on her BlackBerry and when she went to her inbox, Mark’s name was at the top again. She paused for a moment then opened it.
Just finished the meeting. Went v well, I’m sure we’ll get the contract, so def worth staying. Home tonight to see my gorgeous wife – not many hours to go . . .
Chapter Fourteen
Hannah lay on her back, eyes open. Their bedroom was at the back of the house and there was never any noise or light from the street, but here in the spare room an orange glow seeped around the curtains to stain the ceiling, and every few minutes, even this late, a car came cruising down the road outside, its headlights sweeping the room like a torch-beam. She couldn’t go next door and sleep in their bed, though: she was too confused, too angry. This room, this bed, was neutral, no-man’s-land.
She turned her head to look at the clock on the bedside table. 02.47. What was Mark doing now? He’d be on the plane, either in the air or just taking off. He might be asleep already: even if he’d adjusted to New York time in the past few days, he was one of those people who had the gift of sleeping any time, anywhere, making dead hours count. If they took a night flight together, he would arrive fresh and well rested while she, having worked her way through the films and strained to read by the overhead spotlight, always pitched up at the other end looking like the subject of some sort of clinical trial. And what would be keeping him awake, anyway? He had no idea she knew about any of this.
She turned over, away from the window and the demonic red glow of the clock, closed her eyes and tried again to find a comfortable position. Now her arm was the problem, uncomfortable tucked under her body, awkward held out in front. The real issue, however, was her mind, which was racing despite everything she’d done to try to switch off. She’d made up this bed with fresh sheets, watched an hour of mindless TV and had a warm bath, with her old copy of Our Man in Havana. She loved the book, she’d read it several times, but tonight her eyes kept sliding away from the page and none of the jokes made her smile.
Before that, though, she’d been reading all evening. She’d deleted Mark’s email without responding then gone back to the computer and read article after article until her eyes ached from screen glare. Every new fact repulsed her, the words leaping out in all their tabloid horror – death! sado-masochism! ligatures! cocaine! – yet still she clicked on the next piece with the fervour of an addict.
In abbreviated form, the story had even reached some of the foreign newspapers. How the hell had she missed it at the time? Maybe she hadn’t completely; maybe she’d seen the headlines and decided she didn’t need to read the rest, all the prurient details about the playboy and the party-girl and the sticky ends they’d come to. And Reilly was pretty common as surnames went; there was no reason why it would have rung a bell when she’d met Mark. But it was also possible she hadn’t seen the coverage at all. When she’d been working really hard, finishing a big project, she’d sometimes gone weeks without more than a cursory glance at the papers for anything relevant to what she was working on.
Tonight she’d read coverage from broadsheets and tabloids, the websites of TV channels and news magazines, until after a while she’d thought there were no more grim details to discover. Then, just as she was about to force herself to turn off the computer, she’d found a feature-length story published in the news review section of a Sunday broadsheet the weekend after Nick’s conviction. The headline was A Death in Chelsea.
The piece started with a portrait of Patty, many of the details now so familiar to Hannah that she was beginning to feel as if she’d actually known her growing up: her father’s job as the chief executive of an electronics company in Hemel Hempstead; her stay-at-home mother and her brother, Seb, two years younger and identified as a future track star by the age of ten; the six-bedroomed house in a small village outside St Albans, with its swimming pool and the long paddock where Patty kept her ponies, Mischief and then Gorgeous Gus. Hannah knew about the gymkhanas and the summer sailing camps and the house in the Dordogne that Richard and Lara Hendrick had bought when their daughter was twelve, and she knew about the mediocre grades that made it obvious from early on that Patty’s childhood dream of becoming a vet would stay a dream.
The fact that she had been a willing sexual partner at the beginning of that nightmarish weekend had deterred the papers that trumpeted their ‘family values’ from the usual hagiography of the victim, but this journalist, Carole Temple, had talked to several childhood friends who described Patty’s tender heart and many acts of generosity. One told the story of how she’d started visiting an elderly widow in the village and then, when she’d learned that the woman loved books but was losing her sight, had begun reading to her every Sunday afternoon.
While pretending pity, most of the other pieces had related Patty’s fall from grace with relish, detailing her friendship with the ‘wilder element’ at her exclusive but not very academic girls’ school, the slipping of her grades, her experimentation – why did they always use that word? – with alcohol and marijuana. At that point, many of the articles made it sound as if the die were irrevocably cast, as if every teenage girl who’d ever taken a drag on an inexpertly rolled spliff in the company of a few sixth-form boys from the local comprehensive had set themselves on a road to perdition whose only destination was an early demise at the hands of a Bad Man.
Temple, however, had resisted the easy picture of the good-girl-gone-bad and instead asked questions about the expectations of a young woman like Patty, well brought up and attractive if not especially bright. What part did she see for herself in a society where women like her mother, who stayed at home and raised families, were routinely dismissed as pointless non-contributors? The intrinsic value of that role, argued Temple, its respectability, had been eroded to the point of non-existence, to an extent where it was no longer acceptable for a young woman to admit that she wanted to be a full-time mother. And what had replaced that position in the eyes of young women like Patty? A culture obsessed with celebrity and appearance, where the women most venerated in the media, and some of the highest paid, were those who posed for lads’ mags in G-strings, and fell drunkenly out of nightclubs. And the scorn levelled at any young woman perceived as not ‘up for it’ . . . So far from liberating girls like Patty, ladette culture, argued Temple, had enslaved them, turned them into walking, talking sex toys.
Hannah had assumed the piece would continue in the same feminist vein but, somewhat abruptly, the journalist had changed tack and moved on to Nick, who, in the photograph they’d used, appeared deeply tanned and laughing as he swung into the driver’s seat of a silver BMW convertible, a lovely Cotswold-stone house in the background.
In his case, too, it was clear that Temple had researched deeper and harder than the other journalists; there were several details that Hannah knew only because Mark himself had told her that night in New York. The sensational piece in the Gazette had mentioned Eastbourne, quoted old classmates of Nick’s probably contacted by phone, but Temple, it was clear, had been there.
The curtains were drawn this week in the front windows of the two-bedroomed bungalow where Nicholas Reilly spent his childhood, as if his parents, who still live in the house, want to close their eyes against the reality of the crime of which their son was this week found guilty.
Cowering under a matching sky, the small grey pebbledashed bungalow, though immaculately maintained, seems an incongruous location for a boyhood that several who know the family describe as charmed or ‘golden’.
‘Nick was one of those children who seemed destined for a happy life,’ said a family friend who asked to remain anonymous. ‘He was a beautiful baby who grew into a beautiful little boy, always laughing, always smiling. We used to say to Lizzie, his mother, that she should let him be a child model – he would have made a fortune.’
‘He was bright as a button,’ said Leigh Stanton, his first teacher at primary school. ‘Learn
ing came easily to him – he was a joy to teach. He read and wrote early and he was interested in everything. The only challenge was getting him to sit still – he was always restless, full of energy – and telling him off was next to impossible when he looked up at you with those big brown eyes.’
If Reilly’s early childhood was charmed, however, by the time he left junior school, there were troubling signs. Though no one interviewed for this piece was willing to be quoted, a number of people hinted at Elizabeth Reilly’s shyness and lack of confidence, and her emotional reliance on her younger son. Others voiced reservations about the way she lavished attention on the boy and showered him with toys and gifts that many were surprised the family could afford. His brother Mark, a year older, seems not to have been indulged to the same extent.
Perhaps his status as the spoiled younger child contributed to the wild streak that Nick started to exhibit as his teenage years began, or at least to his apparent indifference to the consequences of his actions, alluded to by many people who knew him. That sense of being untouchable – of living outside the rules or even, finally, the law – was to become one of Reilly’s defining characteristics.
The first indication that something was wrong was a falling-off in his attendance record during his third year at secondary school. Truant officers soon became regular visitors to the bungalow. ‘It got to the stage,’ said Matt Trenton, a classmate, ‘where he wasn’t allowed to get the school bus any more and his dad had to drive him and walk him in through the front door, which Nick hated, obviously. It made no difference: by breaktime, he’d be gone, out the door again. He used to hang around down on the beach and drink or smoke weed. Sometimes, he said, he got the train into Brighton to play arcade games.’
At fourteen, he was excluded from school for a week for verbally abusing a teacher who had embarrassed him in front of his classmates.
Before We Met: A Novel Page 16