It had still been light when Hannah had left the hospital but by the time the Tube rattled back above ground at Eel Brook Common the sun, such as it had been, was long gone. Though it wasn’t yet five, the train had become busier and busier as it tracked its way under central London, and from Monument on, she’d been surrounded by a thicket of legs in suits, a changing cast of crotches at eye-level that swayed and lurched towards her as the carriage cornered, their owners gripping the overhead bar with one hand, texting or clutching double-folded copies of the Standard with the other. It was nearly Monday evening suddenly: Mark would be back in the morning.
Prison. The idea was incredible: his brother – her brother-in-law, whatever Mark said – was in prison. As she’d left the hospital, the word had been tolling in her ears: prison, prison. What had Nick done? Pride had stopped her from asking Hermione. She’d already humiliated herself by going there and accosting the woman in the corridor, accusing her of having an affair. Hannah felt blood rush to her face at the memory. She might just as well have come out and said it: our marriage is a sham; I don’t trust Mark not to sleep around, and he doesn’t trust me enough to tell me about his brother. She’d played it off as though she knew all about it – Of course! His brother, of course. Very sorry, crossed wires – but Hermione clearly hadn’t been fooled. Why would she have been? She had half a brain, didn’t she?
Hannah had a momentary mental image of Hermione’s face as she’d left, the lines around her wide eyes. She was very attractive, striking even, but she looked knackered, completely worn out. Actually, what she looked was worn down, as if she’d been tired for a very long time. Maybe it was smoking that had given her that pale, prematurely aged skin, the dark circles and the bony bird-like sternum visible in the vee of her green surgical tunic. Surely not, though: she was in her late thirties, forty-one or -two at most if she was Mark’s direct contemporary; she wasn’t old enough for the kippered smoker’s look. It was stress that made people look like that, years of stress, doubtless in her case the pressure of making it to the top in the male-dominated, big-swinging-dicks world of surgery.
The train pulled in at Parsons Green and Hannah got out. A light drizzle had started to fall while she’d been underground and the paving on the platform was slick and black, the halos around the streetlights smeared against the purple sky. She joined the crush of people filing downstairs towards the barrier. What had Nick done? All the way across London she’d been asking herself the question again and again. Had he been drink-driving again and caused criminal damage – or hit someone? Could it be drugs? She remembered the £10,000 he’d stolen from DataPro’s accounts. What if he’d done that at another company, one at which he didn’t have his brother to let him off without prosecution?
Everyone who’d been on the train, it seemed, was going her way and the pavement outside the station was clogged, a bottleneck forming behind a woman struggling to put up an umbrella. Hannah felt her frustration rising as she was forced to dawdle along behind a couple in matching trenchcoats who were holding hands and strolling as if it was a sunny Sunday afternoon. Come on, come on: she had to get home, get online.
At the White Horse, the couple turned off down Ackmar Road and the congestion started to disperse. Hannah picked up speed, her feet tapping an anxious rhythm past the girls’ school and the large red-brick houses that overlooked the Green. The pavement was dark, the light from the Victorian-style streetlamps struggling to penetrate the dank November air.
Quarrendon Street was deserted, and the sound of traffic on the New King’s Road faded quickly behind her. She opened the front door and the heavy silence inside rushed out to envelop her before she’d even stepped over the threshold. She slammed the door, dumped her coat on the stairs and went through to the kitchen.
Her laptop was on the table and she sat down and pulled it towards her. Suddenly, however, her sense of urgency evaporated and a sickening dread took its place. Standing again, she went to the drawer of odds and ends and took out the half-empty packet of cigarettes that Tom had left behind the last time he came over. She lit one on the gas ring and took it out into the yard where she managed five or six drags before feeling nauseous. She tossed it into the puddle by the stone trough and heard it fizzle and go out.
Back inside, she poured a large measure of the Armagnac Mark had been given by his aerospace client in Toulouse and sat back down at the table. She brought up a new Google window then stopped again. Was information about criminal convictions available online? Was there an official record? Apart from Nick’s name, she had nothing to search by. Where had he been tried? Mark had said he lived in London but who knew if that was true? And how long ago had it happened? How long had his sentence been?
Into the search bar she typed Nick Reilly found guilty. Links to a blog about the guilty pleasures of football and another protesting against the adoption of Sharia law in the UK, then Business Week talking about David Nick Reilly, president of General Motors. On the second page, there was a series of stories about people found guilty of dealing marijuana but all of them were American or Canadian; none was from the UK.
Hannah took a swig of the brandy, deleted Nick and typed in Nicholas. She hit return and waited. This time the first hit was a story in the Daily Mail: Playboy ‘Monster’ Found Guilty of Manslaughter.