‘It had everything to do with you. Do you have any idea how hard I’ve been working to try and keep this all under control, to try and save our marriage?’
‘Save our marriage?’ She was incredulous.
‘The stories, the explanations – layer after layer and nothing seemed to satisfy you. You just wouldn’t stop digging – it was like you were trying to destroy us.’ He seemed to choke and she heard blood bubble in his nose. Was he crying?
She tried to move but he pressed his weight down again, pinning her firmly.
‘You’re the first woman I’ve ever loved, Hannah. Do you know what that means? Before you, everyone I’d ever met was with me for one of two reasons: as a way of getting to him or for my money. But when I met you – I can’t give you my money. You don’t want it.’ He laughed, as if the whole thing were delightful. ‘You won’t use my cards, I know you feel weird about the Audi – and I love it. It’s wonderful – you’re with me because you want me. Me.’
‘Mark, please – let me go.’
‘No, I need you to listen, Hannah – I’m trying to explain. You’re different. You’re everything I ever wanted – remember I told you that, on our wedding day? I could have had a lot of different women – once you’ve got money, it’s amazing how attractive you are suddenly – but you’re not like that. What I’m trying to say is that you’ve got class. It’s in everything you do – the way you dress, how you look. Your books and music and films. Even your running – I know you hate it but you do it because you’ve got backbone. That’s class.’
‘Mark . . .’
‘Hannah, I love you and I want to be with you for the rest of my life. We can keep a lid on all this, Nick, until the deal’s done – we’ll find a way. I’ll sell the company and then we’ll leave London, go wherever you want. We can forget this ever happened – put it behind us and . . .’
‘What? Mark, you killed someone.’
‘Only because I had to – to stop you finding out.’ His voice rose in frustration at her refusal to understand. ‘I didn’t want to but I had no choice. Nick was going to ruin everything – it was all going to come out, I was terrified of losing you. I had to try to—’
‘Is he dead?’
‘I think so. Yes.’ Mark said it calmly, matter-of-fact. ‘See? He’s gone and you know everything now. We can start again with a clean slate. We’ll go somewhere and make a fresh start. We can make this work; I know we can. Tell me we’re going to be fine.’ He tightened his grip on her wrists. ‘Say it.’
‘I . . .’
‘Say it.’
‘I can’t – I can’t. You’ve killed people – we can never go back.’
He gave a cry of pure anguish. ‘You . . .’ He looked at her for a second, eyes shining in the dark, and then he let go of her wrists and grabbed hold of her coat by the neck. He pulled her towards him and now, at this angle, she could see his eyes, rage-filled and terrible.
He lifted her higher, jerking her upwards, then thrust her back against the ground. Her head hit something hard in the earth – a rock. The burst of excruciating pain was still resonating through her brain as he dragged her head up and smashed it back down again. He was going to kill her, too. She was going to die here, in the pitch dark, in the middle of a vast, empty field miles from anywhere. She thought momentarily of Tom at home in London waiting for her and she thought her heart would burst.
Up again and down. Her vision was starting to chequer – she was going to black out. With her right hand, she scrabbled around, searching. Down went her head again and for a moment, everything turned black. Then her fingers found what they were searching for: a stone the size of her hand, cold, sharp on one side. Through the fear and panic came one clear thought: This is it.
She gripped the stone, lifted her arm and then, screwing every ounce of her terror and panic and horror together, she smashed it into his temple. For a second Mark seemed merely stunned. Then he gave a single grunt and slumped on top of her.
Chapter Twenty-seven
The temperature hadn’t risen above freezing for ten days but overhead the sky was a blue better fitted for July than the last week of January. There had been a lot of foot traffic here over the weekend, evidently, and the snow was long gone from the path, but up on the steepest parts of the hill and in the lee of the trees, virgin drifts of it remained. Down to their right, untouched by the farmers, the patchwork fields of Herefordshire were white.
Claiming the need for a head start, Sandy and Lydia had gone on first while Hannah and Tom bought the ticket for the car park. Hannah looked up now and saw them a hundred yards or so up ahead, Lydia willowy in her black jeans and borrowed parka, Sandy six inches shorter and bundled up as if for a polar expedition. The sound of their laughter reached back through the stillness of the air.
Tom put his arm through hers as they negotiated a steep section in the path and came up on to a small plateau that gave a clear view of the grassed-over skeleton of the iron-age fort.
I’d take on a fortful of pagans for you, swede-heart. Mark’s voice, as clear as if he was standing beside her.
‘All right?’ Tom was looking at her.
‘Yes.’
‘Sure?’
‘Of course.’ She smiled and took a square of the chocolate that he was proffering. He put the rest of the bar into his pocket again and turned to look back the way they’d come. His cheeks were already ruddy from the cold.
‘Is this where he proposed to you? Up here?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is this meant to be an exorcism?’
‘Of sorts.’
‘Is it working?’
She shook her head. ‘I hear him all the time, wherever I am. I always will, I think.’ She started walking again and Tom caught her up and gave her back his arm. ‘I killed someone,’ she said. ‘The idea of it – another human being is dead because of me.’
‘A human being who killed two other human beings – maybe three – and was about to kill you.’
‘I know. But still.’
They walked on. The Malverns lay ahead of them, the peaks of the line of hills like vertebrae in the spine of an ancient beast that had curled up and fallen asleep underneath the earth. Every night of the two months since it happened Hannah had lain awake and replayed it scene by scene: the confrontation in the kitchen, the chase through the garden out into the pitch-dark fields. The weight of the stone in her hand and the sickening crunch when she’d smashed it against Mark’s temple.
He’d died instantaneously, they’d told her after the autopsy, but she’d known that from the way he’d fallen. Dead weight. It had taken almost all the strength she’d had left to roll him off her, she’d barely had enough energy to stand afterwards, but somehow, slowly, she’d started moving again, stumbling towards the handful of lights, falling many times, her legs weak, her head throbbing with pain. Twice she’d stopped and thrown up, her stomach heaving over and over again though it had been empty except for the half-inch of whisky Nick had given her. Eventually, six huge fields later – she still had no idea how much later in real terms – she’d reached the lights and discovered that they belonged to a pub on the fringe of a village. Bloody, covered in mud, she’d staggered inside.
With the help of the landlord and one of the regulars who’d done gardening work there, the police had managed to identify the house. Despite what Mark had said, Nick hadn’t been dead when they found him, but one of his twelve knife wounds had caught an artery and he’d died of blood loss in the back of the ambulance carrying him to hospital in Swindon. She’d cried when they told her, hysterical tears that took ten minutes to bring under control. It had been three weeks before she’d been able to cry a single tear for Mark.
‘The new flat will help.’
‘What?’
‘Having your own place again,’ Tom said. ‘Being freed from our back bedroom.’
She smiled. ‘I like your back bedroom. But, yes, it’s the right thing.’
Two w
eeks ago she’d woken late. Tom and Lydia had left for work and the house was quiet. She’d gone downstairs, feet bare, and filled the kettle for coffee. Standing at the window, watching a robin fly back and forth from the bird table that Lydia had given Tom for Christmas, the deadening fog that had filled her head had cleared for a moment and she’d known that it was time to get moving again, to break the spell of the horror and get on with her life. She’d made the coffee and sat down with her computer to look at flats to rent.
She’d seen seven or eight before she’d found the one she’d taken, a one-bedroomed place on the third floor of a Victorian red-brick mansion block a few minutes’ walk from Russell Square. As soon as she’d walked in, she’d been able to see herself living there. It was a little bit shabby, she’d have to hide the carpet in the hallway with rugs, but the landlord had given her permission to paint, the kitchen was newly renovated and there was a nook under the window in the sitting room that would be perfect for a desk.
More than ever, what she craved now was work. She hadn’t got the job at Penrose Price; Roger Penrose, despite his cutting-edge advertising campaigns, had proved to be old-fashioned about the idea of hiring someone embroiled in a case that had been splashed across the national papers for a week. He’d written her a letter full of compliments in which he also communicated that they’d hired a candidate with substantial experience of working with clients similar to their own. When she’d looked up the announcement in Campaign, she saw that the job had gone to someone who’d interned for her before she went to New York.
There was hope, however. Ten days ago, Leon, her old boss, had emailed to say that he was in London on a flying visit. Over drinks at his hotel in Charlotte Street, he’d asked her for ideas for two major new pitches. If he won the business, he said, he’d like her to work on them with him, in what capacity they could discuss later. ‘As head of the London office?’ she’d said, raising an eyebrow, and though he’d rolled his eyes, he hadn’t said no.
In the meantime, her mother had lent her money to keep her going. Eventually – at least in theory – she would be rich: everything Mark had owned, he’d willed to her. She didn’t want any of it. She’d decided that, when the time came, she would give it all to his parents, though she suspected that Mark’s father’s pride would stop him from touching it, too.
Up ahead, Sandy slipped on the path, nearly pulling Lydia down with her. Hannah laughed, and when she stopped, she saw that Tom had been watching her.
‘I’m glad you and Mum are getting on better,’ he said.
She shrugged. ‘It was Mark’s mother, how much she loved him despite everything. It just made me realise how harsh I was to mine. We had a chat.’
Tom nodded. ‘She told me.’ He took the chocolate from his pocket and snapped off two more squares. They’d walked twenty yards or so before he spoke again. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I want to tell you something.’
‘What?’
‘Mum made me promise I never would, but now I think you should know.’
‘What, Tom?’
‘Their break-up, the divorce – you’ve always blamed it on her, her paranoia, but she was right. Dad was having an affair.’
Hannah stopped walking. ‘No, that can’t be . . .’
‘He met Maggie before he and Mum split up.’
‘Then why the hell didn’t she say something? Jesus – all those years. And I was so furious with her . . .’
‘She knew how much you loved him and she didn’t want to damage that. She let you go on believing she was the bad guy so that you wouldn’t be angry with him and let it damage your relationship.’
Hannah looked at her mother and felt a lump come into her throat. She’d got everything wrong – everything. Suddenly, though, on top of the beacon under the cold blue bowl of the sky, the realisation felt liberating. From now on, surely, she could only do better.
Acknowledgements
This book wouldn’t have happened without the unstinting support of my husband. Thank you, Joe.
I’d also like to thank the following people: Helen Garnons-Williams, Ellen Williams and Elizabeth Woabank at Bloomsbury; Rebecca Folland and Kirsty Gordon at Janklow & Nesbit; Claire Paterson and Kathleen Anderson.
A Note on the Author
Lucie Whitehouse was born in Warwickshire in 1975, read Classics at Oxford University and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of two previous books, The House at Midnight and the TV Book Club pick The Bed I Made.
#BeforeWeMet
@LWhitehouse5
Copyright © 2014 by Lucie Whitehouse
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eISBN: 978-1-62040-276-4
First published in Great Britain in 2014
First U.S. Edition 2014
This electronic edition published January 2014
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Before We Met: A Novel Page 31