The coffee was stone cold but she took a sip and went back. Where had she gone wrong? Maybe it had been Elisabeth, not Elizabeth, though her name had been spelled with a ‘z’ in the news coverage. In a new window, she double-checked that Eastbourne was in Sussex then broadened the range of years in which Mrs Reilly might have died from 1990 – when Mark would have been only eighteen – to 2005. She gave the search for her year of birth a span of twenty years. No results found.
Going back again, she unchecked the boxes that stipulated precise matches only, allowing all variant spellings and abbreviations of the names Elizabeth and Reilly and widening the range of her possible birth year to twenty years either side of 1946. Mark had been born in 1972 so that had to cover it: if she’d been born in 1926, she’d have been forty-six when she’d had him, forty-seven when she’d had Nick the following year. If she’d been born in 1966, she would have had Mark at age six. Still nothing.
Maybe there was a problem with Elizabeth’s record. Hannah cleared the boxes and instead entered Mark’s father’s details, as far as she knew them, double-checking with Carole Temple’s feature, where people who knew the family unambiguously called him Gordon. She entered his year of birth as 1935, on the basis that he may have been older than his wife, and set the range at twenty years to either side, 1915 to 1955, making him somewhere between seventeen and fifty-seven when Mark had been born. No results.
Frustrated, Hannah cleared the boxes again and entered her own grandmother’s details, leaving ten years around the date of her death, though she knew it exactly, and twenty years around her date of birth. When she hit return, Margaret Hannah Simpson, died Gloucestershire, Malvern, 1989, came up straight away. A search for her grandfather was just as quick.
She stood and walked around for a moment, pulling the curtain aside and looking down into the street. Outside one of the Victorian terraced houses, a teenage boy was soaping an old Volvo at glacial pace, and further up, a woman in jeans and a fleece was opening her front door, a nest of Waitrose carrier bags around her feet. A normal Saturday morning. Hannah dropped the curtain and came back to the table. Either there was a problem with the Reillys’ records or she’d got something wrong. Maybe they hadn’t died in Eastbourne; maybe Mark had brought them to hospitals in London so that he could be close to them or get them private care. She tried new searches on that basis but again, got nothing.
Into a new Google window, she typed ‘UK electoral roll’. The snippet of text underneath the link to whitepages.co.uk assured her that using the electoral register was a reliable way to search for people. Her hope faded as she scanned a short introductory paragraph that told her the site used a database from 2002 but she typed Gordon Reilly’s name into the boxes at the top – Gordon was probably less common a name than Elizabeth – and added ‘Eastbourne’. She hit return with no great expectation but almost immediately a new page opened: ‘1 Match for Gordon Reilly in Eastbourne’. The box underneath gave an address.
Hannah frowned, went back to the search page and typed in ‘Elizabeth Reilly’. This time, the site found two people with that name in Eastbourne. One of them lived at the same address as Gordon.
Heart thumping now, she went back and double-checked. Yes, the database was from 2002, when Mark had been thirty, but how well maintained was it? Could their names have been left on there by mistake? Had word failed to reach the council when they’d died? At her old flat in Kilburn, polling cards used to arrive for former residents years and years after they’d moved out: the system definitely wasn’t watertight. Further on, however, she saw that the site was claiming to update its records quarterly.
The results page had three boxes giving name, address and telephone number. In the case of both Gordon and the Elizabeth who shared his address, the box for the telephone number was blank. Hannah leaned back in the chair and reached for her bag on the bed, hooking a finger through the strap and swinging it across into her lap. Finding her phone, she entered the number for Directory Enquiries. She paused briefly before making the call, checking her conscience, but discovered that every last vestige of guilt about investigating the Reillys had gone.
She gave the operator Gordon’s name and address and waited. The tapping of keys and then the woman came back on the line. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but that number’s ex-directory.’
Hannah thought. ‘Does that mean,’ she said, ‘that there’s definitely a Gordon Reilly at that address?’
‘That’s what the records say.’
‘Could you try Elizabeth Reilly, please? Same address.’
More tapping. ‘Yes, there’s an Elizabeth Reilly listed but again, it’s ex-directory.
‘Okay, thanks.’ Hannah hung up and started a text message. Morning, she wrote. A favour: if Mark rings, will you tell him I’m with you but I’m in the loo or I’ve popped to the shops with Lydia or something, then call me?
Within seconds, her phone started ringing. Tom’s number. She hesitated, torn between the urge to pick up and tell him everything, and the sudden time pressure: it was quarter past eleven already and Eastbourne was . . . what? An hour and a half’s drive from London? More, maybe. If she was going to get there and back by seven, she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, and no honest conversation with Tom at this point was going to be short. She let the phone ring and got ready to go. When she came out of the bathroom, the phone had stopped ringing for the third time and there was a text instead: What’s going on?
Perversely, she immediately felt better about dodging him: there was an obvious logic, surely, to finding out whether there actually was anything going on before she freaked her brother out. What? asked the snide voice in her head. Anything other than Nick being a killer, you mean?
She ignored it and tapped out a reply: Nothing going on, just need a bit of space today. Full explanation coming Monday, promise.
I don’t like it. Tom’s response was almost instant. But if you swear you’re telling me the truth, I’ll do it. And stop ignoring my calls.
Swear, she wrote, feeling guilty. And I will. Thanks, bro.
Chapter Twenty-three
The Underground was the quickest way to Parsons Green but it wasn’t nearly quick enough. The train lingered at Earl’s Court, doors wide open to the freezing platform, and Hannah was on the point of getting off and taking a taxi when she remembered that she only had six pounds in her purse. Going to the cash-point would just swallow more time. There was no guarantee that a taxi would be quicker, anyway: it was Saturday and the roads around the north of Fulham would be gridlocked, especially if Chelsea were playing at home.
She rested her head against the glass panel and tried to stay calm. Outside the hotel she’d stopped to look at the TT. It would have been much faster – it was right there in front of her, she had the key in her bag – but when it came to it, she hadn’t been able to. For this, she wanted – needed – her own car.
She was standing ready at the doors as the train pulled into Parsons Green. The temperature had dropped noticeably since she’d left Shepherd’s Bush and a cold wind was gusting round the elevated platform. She took the stairs at a gallop and headed out of the station, car key already in her hand. As she made her way down the side of the Green, a car slowed almost to a stop behind her and the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Then, though, she heard it go over a speed bump and it accelerated past.
The VW was further down Quarrendon Street than she remembered. As she passed the house, she thought it looked different. They’d been gone fewer than twenty-four hours but somehow it had already taken on an empty look, the upstairs windows blankly reflecting the cold white sky, the privet of the front hedge shivering stiffly in the wind. A little way up, on the other side of the street, she’d seen a man in a non-descript blue Honda with a newspaper spread across the steering wheel: the police watch. He’d barely glanced up as she passed but she knew that he’d registered her, discounted her as not-Nick.
She ran the last twenty yards to the car, got in and slapped the lo
ck down as if he was actually behind her. Reaching over, she took the Sat Nav out of the glove box. It had been a present from Mark but, besides the rare occasions when he was in the car, she barely used it, objecting to having orders barked at her. Today, though, it would be a godsend. Hands shaking, she entered the address from the Internet and waited for it to calculate a route. When it was finished, the estimated journey time said two hours, three minutes. Shit. For a moment she considered ditching the whole idea – she’d never get back to the hotel by seven; it was probably a wild goose chase, anyway – but then she heard an echo of Mark’s voice: ‘My parents were already gone.’
The traffic on the roads out of town had been so heavy that twice she’d had no choice but to put the car in neutral and sit and watch as the minutes added themselves to the journey time one after another. When she saw the first signs for Eastbourne, she’d been driving for more than two and a half hours. Thirty or forty miles back, the urban outer reaches of London had given way to fields and scrubby verges covered in the dark gorse she associated with the south coast but now she could feel the influence of the sea itself. The sky was turning dark, the cloud curdling overhead, but around her, everything appeared with the particular clarity of coastal light, as if the whole landscape had been brushed with glaze. She passed through somewhere called Polegate, where the architecture – detached houses, a Harvester chain pub – had the thirties and forties look that she knew from other seaside places, Bournemouth and Poole. On her right rose gentle green hills, the tail end of the South Downs.
After another two or three miles, the houses started to huddle closer together and became more uniform. The brick-built properties on her left were still substantial, but the houses on the other side of the road were smaller and less attractive. Glancing at the screen, she saw that she’d reached the outer edges of Eastbourne. Suburbia.
In two hundred yards, turn right, said the Sat Nav. She indicated and slowed, and as she made the turn, she caught sight of the street sign: Selmeston Road. In five hundred yards, confirmed the voice, you have reached your destination.
The first few houses were detached red-bricks with two storeys, but as the street climbed the hill away from the main road there were just bungalows and more bungalows. Over the tiled roofs of those at the far end swelled another hill, grass-covered and patchy with gorse, above which the sky was massing with intent, the cloud darker now and clotted with rain.
Another car had turned off the main road immediately after her and she had no choice but to drive at a reasonable speed. She glanced around, taking in as much as she could at thirty miles an hour. Proximity to the main road was clearly a status indicator. The first bungalows had an unusual semi-detached design and were built split-level into the side of the hill, but here, further on, they were squat and blank-faced, indistinguishable from countless thousands in every other retirement enclave along the south coast.
You have reached your destination.
Slowing, Hannah saw the number she’d written down painted on a floral plaque attached to a low brick wall. The car behind pipped its horn and, without indicating, she swung into a space at the kerb between a white transit van and a tired blue Ford Fiesta. The other car pipped again and roared past her up the hill.
She turned off the engine and sat back in the seat, the urgency that had propelled her from London gone all of a sudden. In the rear-view mirror she looked at the house. It was separated from the road by the width of the pavement then the low wall, inside which ran a box hedge a foot taller. The front garden was thirty feet square or thereabouts, a burgundy Vauxhall Astra occupying a small area of tarmac, the rest a straight-edged lawn of closely shorn grass edged with privets and three hydrangeas, their crisp brown dead-heads bristling. It wasn’t neat so much as bleak.
The house was the same. A recessed front door separated two windows, one a bay – the sitting room, she guessed – the other smaller and cut higher in the wall: a dining room, or possibly a bedroom. Net curtains veiled both windows like cataracts. The roofs of the houses either side had skylight windows, suggesting the loft space had been converted, but as far as she could tell, the owners of this house hadn’t done the same. The place was extremely neat, clearly the result of hard work, but nothing was modern or renovated or new. If you took away the Astra, she thought, you could believe you’d been teleported back to the seventies.
She rolled down the window. The other car had faded from hearing and the only sound was the blustering wind. There was no one on the pavement or in any of the front gardens, no sound of lawn mowers or DIY, no kids on bikes or skateboards shouting and clattering about. The silence was apocalyptic, as if a killer virus had swept through the place overnight. Had Mark really grown up here, in this house? And if he had, how had he survived? Malvern was hardly a hotbed of teenage excitement but compared to this place it was Times Square.
She looked at her hands on the steering wheel. What was she doing? She shouldn’t be here; she shouldn’t have come. This was wrong – very wrong. Then why have you come? asked the voice in her head. While she’d had the momentum of the journey she’d been able to keep the answer at bay but now she made herself face it: she was here because she no longer trusted what Mark told her. She closed her eyes as a chasm of loss opened up inside her. What good was a marriage without trust?
When she opened her eyes again, there was movement in the rear-view mirror. The door of the bungalow was open, and as she watched, a man with steel-grey hair came out and pulled it carefully shut again behind him. He was carrying a bucket that he took slowly over to the bay window and put on the ground. Gingerly, his back evidently giving him trouble, he bent over and fished out a sponge.
Hannah’s heart started beating faster. He was in his seventies, stooped and very thin: his shoulder blades were sharp through the material of his fawn anorak, and when the wind blew against his trousers, his legs looked skinny enough to snap. Even so, she could see the family likeness: he was the same height as Mark, and the shape of his shoulders and back, even his head, was the same. This man operated at a tenth of the pace but his movements had a precise quality that was utterly familiar to her. Looking at him was like seeing Mark fast-forwarded into the future
He wrung out the sponge and started soaping the window, his arm moving in slow, methodical arcs. The longer she watched him, the more sure Hannah was: this was Mark’s father, and Mark had lied again – he was still lying, now, when he’d sworn he’d finally told her the truth. More than that, he’d lied to her from the very beginning, from their second date in New York, before he’d even known her at all.
The old man bent to rinse the sponge and Hannah’s eyes filled with tears. If he was Mark’s father – he was, said the voice – one of his sons was a killer and the other one, the good one, told people – his own wife – that he was dead.
The decision took two seconds. Hannah swiped her cuff across her eyes, grabbed her bag and got out of the car. The wind snatched the door from her hand and as it slammed, she saw him turn. At the bottom of the short tarmac drive she stopped.
‘Mr Reilly.’
He dropped the sponge back into the bucket and pulled himself slowly up to full height, as if bracing himself. As she came round the bonnet of the Astra, he glanced up and down the street behind her. When he spoke, he kept his voice low. ‘Has something happened? Have you found him?’
The last shred of Hannah’s doubt evaporated.
‘Your colleagues were here before,’ he said. ‘Only an hour ago. We told them then: we haven’t heard from Nick.’
‘Mr Reilly, I’m not from the police. My name’s Hannah Reilly. I’m Mark’s wife.’
A look of astonishment broke over his face. His eyes widened and his lips parted as if he were about to say something but no words came out. For two or three seconds he was absolutely still but then his face changed again and his expression turned hard. ‘You’re Mark’s wife?’
‘Yes.’
He glanced past her at the street aga
in. ‘Does he know you’re here?’
‘No.’
He considered that then gave a single nod. He looked behind him at the front door. ‘Will you come inside?’ he said.
Hannah hesitated a moment then nodded.
She watched as he took a key from his anorak pocket. His hand shook as he tried to get it in the lock and, after two failed attempts, he brought his other hand up and used both to guide it in. He stood aside, gesturing for her to go first.
A narrow hallway with a dark patterned carpet and an atmosphere pungent with the cooking of older people: some sort of meat and gravy, over-done cabbage. Lunch – it was nearly three o’clock already. On the right were two blank closed doors with cheap metal handles: the bedrooms, or a bedroom and the bathroom. Through the open door immediately to her left, she saw an armchair with a lace-edged antimacassar. A vase of pale fabric flowers sat precisely halfway along a length of windowsill. Behind her, Mr Reilly closed the front door. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘Go and sit down. I’ll just . . .’
She went into the sitting room and a few seconds later she heard a door open at the other end of the hallway. In a cracked voice Mr Reilly said, ‘Lizzie . . .’
Sitting down was the last thing Hannah wanted to do. She needed to run, kick, punch something. Mark had told her his parents were dead, for Christ’s sake. Who did a thing like that? Who’d even think of it? She looked around, trying to distract herself by taking an inventory of the room: the peach floral three-piece suite, the outdated television on its wood-veneer stand, the careful coasters on the two side tables, the dark-wood coffee table where the Radio Times was neatly folded to the day’s date. A leather spectacle case with worn corners rested on a copy of the Eastbourne Herald. Above the ugly brick fireplace was a print of a Scottish Highland scene, the muscular stag and his wild vista an off-note amid the utter dreary domesticity of the rest of the room. From the top of the bureau in the corner, a carriage clock ticked into the silence.
Before We Met: A Novel Page 25