The back of the van was windowless and, from the position she was tied in, Hannah couldn’t move her head far enough to see anything further forward. When he’d pushed her inside, she’d caught a brief view of the back of the seats and the heavy wire grille that separated them from the body of the van. Now all she could see was the van’s blank pressed-steel side and the patch of ceiling directly above her head, the patterns cast across it by the streetlights.
Where was he taking her?
She felt her gorge rising again and tried to swallow. If she threw up with the gag in her mouth, she’d choke. She couldn’t make a noise loud enough for him to hear in the front and she’d choke on her own vomit and suffocate. And what if he did hear her? said the voice in her head. Did she think Nick was going to help her? She thought of Hermione, dead in the yard at the back of the pub, her head smashed in, blood and bone and brain.
She pushed back, trying to lift her face away from the sacking that lay piled on the van floor. It was rough and reeked of earth and grass cuttings rotted to compost with an under-note of petrol that caught the back of her throat.
In the front section of the van, three feet away but hopelessly out of reach, she heard her phone start to ring. It rang five times then stopped as voicemail clicked in. Twenty seconds passed and then it rang again. ‘Christ’s sake,’ he muttered, and she heard him rummaging through her bag. A couple of seconds later, the ringing stopped for a second time and she heard the long tone the phone made when it was turned off.
Her forehead was throbbing where she’d hit it. He’d pushed her inside and climbed in after her, pulling the door shut behind him. The bang to the head had stunned her for a moment but then she’d started fighting, kicking and shouting, trying to make as much noise as possible. At one point she’d managed to bite his hand and he’d sworn and snatched it away level with his shoulder. She’d thought he was going to bring it back and hit her across the face but instead he’d launched himself at her again, pushing her back down and straddling her chest, pinning her arms with his knees while he tied the cloth across her face. She’d writhed and kicked, trying to bring her legs up behind him to knee him in the small of the back, but he was too strong and in a few seconds he had forced her on to her front, pulled her hands behind her back and bound them together with something hard and sharp-edged: perhaps a plant-tie. He’d done the same with her feet.
He’d checked both sets of ties twice and, when he was satisfied, he’d crawled to the door and got out, taking her bag with him. Seconds later, she heard him get back in at the front of the van and the engine had started. He’d made a four- or five-point turn – the street was narrow with cars parked on both sides – and headed back towards Studdridge Street.
In her panic, she’d quickly lost track of where they were going – any number of streets led off Studdridge; had he turned left then or just swerved? – but now, from outside, she heard a distinctive high-pitched beeping. She knew it; she’d heard it countless times: the pedestrian crossing on Parsons Green Lane, just outside the Tube station. They’d stopped – he was waiting for the light. She thought she heard the click of buttons – was he texting? – and then there was a thunderous clatter overhead: a train on the bridge, slowing, coming into the station. She felt a burst of elation – she knew where they were – but as quickly as it came, it was gone. What good was knowing where she was? She was bound and gagged, lying helpless in the semi-darkness in a van driven by a man who’d killed a woman. Two women.
Trying to concentrate seemed to quell the panic, though, at least to some extent. It was something to focus on, a straw to clutch at. They started moving again and she pictured Parson’s Green Lane, the little café, the fish-and-chip shop, the doctor’s surgery. At the top, he turned left on to Fulham Road.
She traced the route in her head as he took them up Fulham Palace Road to the roundabout at Hammersmith and then – two sets of traffic lights followed by a sudden acceleration – on to the A40. The lights on the van ceiling changed, the orange streetlamp glow giving way to the strobing white of headlights passing quickly on the other side of the road. Her heart started beating faster, the panic rising again: unless he turned off soon, they were heading for the motorway. They were leaving London.
The roar of planes coming in to land at Heathrow was the last thing Hannah was sure about. After that, there was just the sound of the engine and the other traffic around them on the motorway, with an occasional rough bronchitic cough from the front. Every few minutes there was the click of a lighter and the air filled with acrid cigarette smoke. Had they stayed on the M4 or had Nick taken the London Orbital and then one of the numerous other motorways that came off it like spokes? There was no way of knowing: they could be heading anywhere. Without markers, time started to billow in and out: had it been ten minutes since she’d heard the planes or twenty? The rain came in waves, too, sometimes drumming so hard on the windscreen that he was forced to slow down, sometimes dying away almost completely.
She took an inventory of her pain. Her head was bad – the temple she’d hit was throbbing, sending needles of pain down through her eye – but her shoulder was injured, too. Something, either muscles or a ligament, was seriously torn.
She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother now. If something happened – if he kills you, said the voice – she’d never have a chance to say sorry. It was Mrs Reilly who’d done it, the reverence with which she’d handled that cheap photograph album, her desperate face at the car window. Despite everything, ten years of being ignored – scorned, her husband had said – she’d been prepared to beg a stranger for the smallest chance of seeing her son again.
Despite the way Hannah had behaved towards her, the brusque behaviour and constant rejection, her mother loved her, wanted to talk to her, counted down the weeks and months between Hannah’s infrequent visits. Hannah remembered how she’d stood in the kitchen in Malvern as a teenager quoting The Second Sex – hardly her own intellectual discovery: they’d studied it for French A-level – and denouncing her mother’s choices in life and she was ashamed of herself. Yes, her mother had never had a career, had never wanted one beyond bringing up her children, but couldn’t she, Hannah, one of the recipients of that love and attention and sacrifice, respect that? Be grateful? Despite all the hurt she’d inflicted, she realised, she could always rely on her mother’s unfailing loyalty and love. She thought of the trepidation she heard in Sandy’s voice when she telephoned, her obvious fear that she’d called at the wrong time, and Hannah wanted to cry with shame. If she came through this alive, she thought, she’d go to Malvern and throw herself at her mother’s feet, tell her she loved and appreciated her and was sorry.
There was the click of the indicator and they pulled out again. He was driving quickly but not quickly enough, she realised with despair, to draw the attention of the police. She could sense him, his physical presence seemed to weigh down the air, but he hadn’t uttered a word to her since he’d slammed the back doors shut. The silence was worse than anything he might have said. Years ago on the news, she’d seen Stephanie Slater, the woman Michael Sams had kidnapped and kept tied up for days in a wheelie bin. She’d told the interviewer that she’d talked to him, never let him forget that she was a real person, trying to make it harder for him to kill her. But this wasn’t about sex, was it, and she wasn’t some poor woman pulled off the street at random.
Hannah tried to think logically. Why would Nick kill her? He’d had a reason for killing Hermione but she, Hannah, had done nothing to him. What would he hope to achieve? Then she had another thought. What if he’d finally spoken to Mark and he knew he didn’t have the money? Was that it? Was this some kind of revenge attack? Or was she going to be used as a bargaining chip? Bait?
They’d been driving for a long time, maybe an hour and a half, maybe two hours, when she heard the indicator again and they began to slow down. They climbed a short slope and the burr of motorway traffic receded. A brief pause, then a green glow on the ceiling and they were moving again but more slowly, fifty miles an hour now, not eighty. She strained, listening for any clue at all as to where they were, but apart from another vehicle every minute or so and the sound of wind in the trees, there was nothing. The road had changed, too, winding one way then the other, dipping then rising. There was no glow of streetlights across the ceiling, no more traffic lights. They were out in the country.
After another ten or fifteen minutes, they slowed almost to a stop and turned off the road on to what felt like an unmade track. The van lurched in and out of potholes, jarring Hannah’s hip and shoulder against the floor. Wherever he was taking her, they must be almost there.
The surface under the wheels changed again and they came on to gravel. Nick stopped the van and got out, slamming his door shut. The crunch of footsteps and then the back doors opened and she saw him silhouetted against the sky. Taking hold of her lower legs, he dragged her towards the doors and pulled her into a sitting position. He took a Stanley knife out of his pocket and she felt a flare of pure fear, but then he bent and cut the tie around her ankles with a quick upward flick. Taking hold of her by the upper arms, he pulled her to her feet. She struggled, trying to get free and head-butt him, but he tightened his grip and held her at arm’s length.
‘I wouldn’t bother,’ he said, voice neutral. ‘We’re miles from anywhere.’
After the fetid sacking, the cold night air smelled clean and sweet. She sucked it in through her nose, trying to flush the stink of rotting vegetation and petrol from her nostrils. Into her head came the idea that this might be the last time she ever smelled fresh air and she pushed it away, ordering herself to keep it together.
Hand between her shoulder blades, Nick pushed her around the side of the van. Cloud blotted out any moonlight but her eyes were accustomed to the dark now and she saw the front of a large, pale-stone house backed by trees. It was the house from the newspaper picture, the one where he’d been photographed with his sports car.
She stumbled as her foot caught the edge of a flagstone on the uneven path, but he caught her, yanking her backwards, sending another bolt of pain through her shoulder. One hand on the neck of her coat, he unlocked the front door and thrust her inside. Then he shut the door after himself, locked it again and pocketed the key.
Reaching out, he snapped the light on. Hannah blinked. They were in a hallway, polished stone flagging underfoot, a wide flight of stairs climbing away into darkness. There was a series of gloomy oil paintings in ornate gilt frames, and at the foot of the stairs a mounted stag’s head with branched antlers. To their left and right were closed doors. The air was warm but smelled strongly of dust, as if the house had been empty for some time and the heating had only just been put back on.
In front of them, a corridor led towards the back of the house. With a sharp nudge, he directed her forward. They went round a corner, passing another pair of closed doors, and came into a room at the end. In the weak light from the window, she made out a table with chairs and then, at the other end, units: a sink, a stove.
Nick flicked the light on, pulled out a chair and pushed her into it. Going behind her, he tied her wrists to the bar across the back then came round and crouched in front of her. She aimed a kick at his face but he caught her ankle before it reached him. ‘Just don’t, all right? There’s no need to make this any harder.’
Through the gag she made a sound she meant him to interpret as ‘Fuck you’.
For the first time now, she saw Nick at close range. No wonder she’d mistaken him for Mark outside the delicatessen. As she knew from the pictures, he had no mole, and his eyes were larger and even darker than Mark’s, the pupils almost indistinguishable from the irises, but the structure of their faces was the same. The only real difference, she could see now, was in their skin. Though he was forty, Mark could pass for thirty-two or three but no one would take Nick for that. He looked older by ten years, if not fifteen. His forehead and the area around his eyes were scored with lines, and other, deeper ones, the result of years of heavy smoking, radiated out from his mouth. He was wearing the pea coat she’d seen him in before, the one that had reminded her of Mark’s, but his black jeans were old, faded and white at the seams, and his beanie was knitted in a cheap nylon-wool mix, completely different from the cashmere one that Mark had picked up at Barneys on a New York trip last year.
Keeping hold of her ankle, he forced it against the leg of the chair, took another garden tie out of his pocket and pulled it tight. When he’d tied her other leg, he stood up and went behind her again. She felt tugging at her hands and then, to her confusion, she realised he’d cut them free. Pain shooting through her shoulder, she brought them round in front of her and saw deep red welts around her wrists. A moment later, she felt his hands at the back of her head again and he pulled the gag out of her mouth.
She took a great gulp of air that hit the back of her throat and made her choke. She coughed until her eyes were streaming. ‘You,’ she croaked as soon as she could catch a breath. ‘You . . .’
Nick put his hands up, palms towards her. ‘I’m sorry.’
She’d been about to scream at him but his tone pulled her up short. ‘You’re sorry?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry – I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t have done it like this, given the choice, but . . . Anyway, I’m not going to hurt you and I’m sorry for frightening you.’
Hannah stared at him but he seemed to be serious. ‘What the hell are you doing then? You abducted me.’
‘You were hardly going to get in the car willingly, were you?’
‘But . . .’
‘Getting you here is the only way of getting my brother here. He wouldn’t meet me and he wouldn’t answer my calls so . . .’
Hannah nearly laughed. ‘He’s been trying to reach you for days, ringing and ringing, since before you got out of prison, until—’ She stopped herself from saying it. Hermione.
‘No,’ Nick said simply. ‘He hasn’t called me once.’
‘You’re lying,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘He told me he’d tried everything to talk to you. He came to visit you in prison. He—’
‘Yes,’ Nick admitted, ‘he did visit me, that’s true at least, but I’m pretty confident he didn’t tell you why he came. Anyway,’ he gave a light shrug, ‘believe me when I tell you that I wouldn’t have gone to this sort of trouble unless I had to. Imagine how it would look to the police as well – my third day out.’
He walked over to the part of the room with the units and she watched him open a cupboard and take out a bottle of whisky and two glasses. Bringing them to the table, he sat down opposite her. He kept his coat on but pulled off his beanie and stuffed it into his pocket. Underneath, his hair was shaved almost to the scalp. He poured an inch of Scotch into both glasses and handed her one. ‘Here. I should think you need it.’
She looked at it for a second then took a swig that made her cough again.
‘I’ve sent him a text to let him know where we are.’
She smiled. ‘Then the police will be here any minute, won’t they?’
Nick regarded her over the rim of his glass. ‘I doubt it.’
From inside his jacket he took a cheap-looking red mobile phone that he put on the table in front of him, and a new pack of Embassy. He tore off the cellophane and pulled out the slip of silver paper inside. ‘I don’t know what he’s told you about me,’ he said, ‘but from the way you ran off the other night, I’m guessing it was the full works. I want to tell you the truth.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
‘Well, that’s bad luck, isn’t it?’ he said, with a dry smile. ‘Given that you’re literally a captive audience.’ He unscrewed the bottle again and poured himself a modest top-up. ‘You need to hear the truth about what happened. To Patty – all of it.’
‘I told you, I’m not interested,’ she said, but there was something about the directness of the way he was looking at her that made her heart start beating very fast. He’s a psychopath, she told herself, an expert manipulator; this is what he does, but his face was open and she thought of his parents, tucked away in their bungalow in Eastbourne, alive after all.
‘You might be more interested,’ he said, ‘if I told you that Mark was there, too.’
‘Yes, at the club that night. I know.’
‘Not at the club – at my flat. He was there when Patty died.’
Hannah went cold. ‘You’re lying,’ she said.
Nick shook his head. ‘No.’
He put a cigarette in his mouth and flicked the lighter. When he inhaled, the tobacco crackled in the silence. ‘He’s told you the official version, obviously – I’m the monster who watched Patty die and didn’t call an ambulance.’
‘He didn’t tell me.’ Hannah felt a surge of relief. ‘I read about it online, in the old newspaper reports. You were tried and found guilty.’
He nodded. ‘I was. But the jury can only base a verdict on the evidence they’ve heard.’
‘Oh, come on,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t even try—’
‘The key to a successful lie is to stay as close to the actual facts as possible. It’s the first rule of deception, isn’t it?’
‘You tell me.’
He ignored her. ‘So, a lot of it was true. I’d reached the end of my rope with Mark and I wanted to piss him off, so one night when his girlfriend was wasted, I chatted her up and took her home.’ He took a pull on the cigarette, watching the end as it glowed red then faded again. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to Patty – I dream about her all the time. She didn’t deserve that, no one would, and what I did was . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It got totally out of hand. We were both so messed up; we’d drunk so much and done so many lines, and . . .’
‘You injected her when she was almost unconscious.’
His eyes went hard. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I haven’t had enough time over the past ten years to reflect on it? I’m telling you, I live with what I did every single day.’ He took a long drag on the cigarette and a soft column of ash fell on the table-top. ‘Mark,’ he said. ‘I pissed him off and he came back and fucked me up. Ten years of my life.’
‘What about her life?’ Hannah said. ‘You let her die. You filled her with drugs, and then, when it all went wrong, you just let her die. He had nothing to do with that. He—’
‘Just shut up for a minute and listen, will you?’ The cigarette was down to the filter and Nick ground it out in the saucer, burning his fingertips. ‘The club, my taking her home, that was Friday night – Saturday morning. On Sunday afternoon, Mark showed up at my flat. I wasn’t going to let him in – he was raging, shouting and banging on the door, and I still had her there. And I was off my face, we both were – we’d been wasted for two days by that point. Mark shoved past me and came barging in. He made so much noise that Patty came to the sitting room to see what the hell was going on. She was in the doorway, naked, hardly able to stand,’ Nick looked down, avoiding Hannah’s eye. ‘Mark grabbed her and threw her face forward across the sofa. He asked her how she liked it, having sex with both brothers.’
Hannah was seized by a sudden dread. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, just stop now.’
He shook his head. ‘You need to know.’
She closed her eyes, as if that would prevent her from hearing.
‘I tried to pull him off her.’
‘I don’t believe you – I don’t believe any of it. This is bullshit.’
‘I tried to pull him off,’ said Nick, talking over her, ‘but he was sober and I was wrecked and I didn’t stand a chance. He shoved me and I hit my head on the corner of the coffee table. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came round, he was standing over her with his trousers undone and she was face down in front of him making this wheezing noise. Her face had gone white and all blue round the mouth, and she was sweating. I said we should call an ambulance – I thought she was having a heart attack. I was crawling round the room on my hands and knees, blood running into my eye, trying to find my phone, but Mark stopped me. He said I’d go to prison for supplying and we could help her ourselves – do mouth-to-mouth, chest compressions.’
‘Except you didn’t.’
‘I did. I tried and tried and tried but it didn’t work. Jesus, when it dawned on me that she was dead . . .’
There was silence for several seconds. Hannah stared at her hands. There was a rushing in her ears, blood thumping through them far too fast, and the room eddied round her like a tide. He’d raped her – Mark had raped Patty. Her husband, the man she was married to, shared a bed with, slept with. ‘And then what happened?’ she said quietly.
‘I said we had to call the police and he said yes but to wait a moment. He said we had to think strategically.’
‘Strategically?’
‘That was his word. Basically, he said, there was no way that we were going to get out of this unscathed and so we had to make the best we could of it.’
Hannah felt the contents of her stomach rise up her throat. He’d raped a woman, she’d died, and then Mark had thought about strategy.
‘If we called the police straight away, he said, both of us would be charged – we were both there, DNA from both of us would be on her body. But things looked much worse for me. She was his girlfriend – there was a reason why his DNA would be on her, and people had seen them together at the club on Friday – it wasn’t a secret they’d nipped off for a quickie. And, as he pointed out, it was my flat she’d died in.’
Nick ran his hands over his shaven head and she heard the stubble rasp. ‘Mark said that if we both went to prison, we’d lose everything. DataPro would be finished, and when we got out, we’d be unemployable – no one else would give us jobs. But,’ Nick looked at her, ‘if one of us took the rap, the other could keep DataPro going and then, when the whole thing was over, it would still be there.’
‘I don’t . . .’
‘He said that because DataPro was his, it made sense for him to be the one who ran it. Patty’s death was an accident, it was the drugs and booze that killed her, he said, not anything that either of us had done to her, so the police couldn’t charge me with anything that would carry a long sentence.’
‘And you just swallowed all this?’
‘I didn’t just swallow it,’ Nick said angrily. ‘I’m stupid but I’m not that bloody stupid. I made a calculation. Either way, I knew I was going to be in deep shit. I mean, if you’ve read about it, you know all the gory details – I wasn’t going to get off scot-free whatever happened. I gave her the drugs; she was in my house; there were . . . marks on her: I was going to jail. Mark told me that if I kept quiet about him ever being at my place that afternoon, he would pay me a dividend from DataPro when I got out.’
‘How much?’ she said, though she already knew.
‘Two million.’
Hannah closed her eyes for a moment. ‘You don’t own any shares at all, do you?’ she said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘He told me that you owned twelve per cent of the company; that you invested your share of your parents’ estate – quarter of a million.’
‘Estate? Our parents aren’t dead.’
‘I know that now,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t until today. Mark told me that you’d invested your inheritance and the two million was to buy you out.’
Nick expelled a short burst of air. ‘I wish.’ He opened the pack of cigarettes again and took out another. He lit it and took a deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs. ‘What would you have done, in my shoes?’ he said. ‘I was going to jail anyway, and if I did it this way, there’d be money waiting when I got out, enough to keep me going for the rest of my life even if no one gave me a job ever again. I told myself that serving the sentence would be my job: I’d put the time in and then I’d get paid. It made sense.’
‘It would if you thought you were only going down for a couple of years,’ she said.
He tipped his head. ‘I didn’t think they’d charge me with manslaughter.’
‘Why didn’t you say something, when they did?’
‘I never thought I’d get ten years. My lawyer said it would be three or four – Patty was a grown-up, she’d known what she was doing. With time off for good behaviour, and parole . . . So I went along with it. Only to be shafted by Mark yet again.’
‘You mean . . .’
‘He’s not paying me.’ Nick stared at her. ‘Whatever reason he gave you for coming to Wakefield, he lied. He came to tell me I could have two hundred and fifty thousand – an eighth of what we’d agreed – take it or leave it.’
Her savings and his own and the new mortgage.
‘And if you left it?’
‘If I didn’t accept the “new terms”, as he called them, he said he’d make sure I was back in prison before my feet touched the ground. All my life,’ Nick said, ‘he’s been trying to take what’s mine. However much he’s got, it’s not enough – he’s not happy unless I’ve got nothing. The day he came to visit me – the second time – he even walked off with my bloody cigarettes.’
Hannah went cold again. ‘Did he tell you how he was going to have you put back in prison?’
‘He mentioned Hermione – I think it was the only thing he could think of. In court she said some stuff about our sex life that was a bit . . .’
‘You hadn’t been in touch with her? You didn’t threaten her?’
‘What?’
‘Nick, Hermione’s dead.’
He stared at her and the cigarette dropped from between his fingers. If there’d been any doubt left in Hannah’s mind, one look at him now would have put paid to it.
‘Dead?’ he said, and his voice had gone faint. ‘Are you . . . ? You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?’
‘She was attacked near the hospital, on her way home – battered to death. She died of head injuries.’
‘When?’
‘Thursday afternoon – late afternoon. Nick, they found a pack of cigarettes with your fingerprints on at the scene.’
He made a terrible sound in his throat as if he were bringing up some deep, integral part of himself, but Hannah barely registered it. Mark had killed Hermione – Mark. He’d planned it – set out to do it in cold blood. Her mind went scrambling back over everything he’d told her, everything that had happened. She remembered that evening – she’d seen Nick outside the delicatessen and Mark had come tearing back across London to find her. Where had he been? He’d left that message on Hermione’s phone at quarter to nine; he’d stood in their sitting room and left a message for a woman he knew was dead – he’d made a joke: ‘Hannah . . . my wife – I think you’ve met.’ Now she remembered his weird, nervous energy, his white knuckles on the poker as he’d jabbed at the fire. Oh, God – he’d kissed her; he’d pushed her against the wall and tried to have sex with her. And the next day, when the police had come, the way he’d trembled . . . She’d taken it for shock, grief, but he must have thought they’d come for him. Hannah retched and retched again. He’d killed a woman – not just a woman: a friend. He’d come home from beating a woman to death and tried to have sex with her.
Nick reached across the table and took hold of her hand. He held it tightly and she looked at their fingers, hers pale, his stained at the tips with nicotine. ‘He told me you’d threatened him, too,’ she said. ‘He said you were violent.’
‘Judging by the way you ran the other night, it worked.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He didn’t want you to talk to me, did he? So he scared the living daylights out of you, made sure you’d run a mile the moment you saw me.’
Hannah remembered how urgently Mark had bundled her into the cab outside the pub that night, how he’d made her promise to stay inside the hotel, how he’d gripped her hand when they’d walked to dinner at Mao Tai. The conversation that night – he’d told her Nick had been threatening Hermione, that that was why she’d looked so terrified in the corridor at the hospital, but it was him she’d been scared of. He was the killer.
She closed her eyes again as if she could shut it out, unsee it. She’d loved him, she’d trusted him, and all the time, he’d been working away at a filigree of lies so carefully made it took her breath away.
For a long time they sat in silence. Nick smoked one cigarette after another, slowly filling the saucer with butts, but he didn’t touch the whisky again. Every few seconds, his eyes went to the cheap red mobile, and after a while he began picking it up, pressing buttons to light up the screen, checking, then checking again.
Hannah watched their silhouettes in the glass of the window behind him, the back of his head, her own white face. The cuts around her wrists throbbed and she was grateful: the pain was something to focus on, an anchor in reality. Otherwise, she was floating. She examined her feelings with a sort of detachment. She should have been afraid, she should have been wild with panic, but instead she felt a strange sense of calm. Perhaps it was a protective thing, she thought. Perhaps this was too much for a person to take in at once and her mind had gone into some sort of fugue state. Perhaps, when this was over, she’d have no mental record of any of it.
In an odd way, too, she felt better – clean. For days and days she’d been sifting through his lies, feeling dirtier and dirtier as she dug down through the layers. Now, finally, she could hold it in her hand and lift it up into the light: the hard kernel of truth he had worked so hard to hide.
‘All this because you hate each other,’ she said, breaking the silence.
‘No,’ said Nick, looking up from the phone. ‘Because Mark hates me. He’s hated me from the day I was born.’ He picked the bit of silver cigarette paper from the table and turned it between his fingers. ‘He hated me because my mother loved me. That was my crime back then, when we were babies: I loved my mother and she loved me. Mark couldn’t stand it.’
‘When did you realise? How old were you?’
‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘It was a fact of my life, there from the beginning, like having parents and getting bigger and knowing you’d go to school one day. My brother hating me, constantly looking for ways to hurt me.’
Hannah thought of gentle Elizabeth Reilly, and her guilt. ‘Do you think your mother was biased?’ she said.
He rubbed his hand over his head. ‘I don’t know – by the time I was old enough to have any sense of that, it had been going on for years. But even as a small child I remember thinking it was weird, how Mark acted towards her. I used to think about it when I was inside, how fucking terrible it was. He wanted her love so badly, he craved it, but he only wanted it if it was exclusive. There were times I thought he might kill me to get it. Even when we were kids – small kids – I used to think that.’
Yesterday, Hannah thought, she would have laughed at the idea.
‘I used to be careful on railway platforms,’ Nick said, ‘that sort of thing. It sounds ridiculous but I could see it – I could imagine a day when he’d spot the opportunity and take it. You know, the push on the empty platform, no one there to see.’
‘That’s . . . horrific.’
He shrugged. ‘It’s the story of our lives, Mark’s quest to hurt me. If not actually to kill me, then to fuck me up.’ He pressed the phone to light the screen: nothing. ‘As you’ve probably realised,’ he said, ‘Mark’s a master planner. He runs rings round me, he always has – I’m stupid and impulsive, I screw things up, but he . . . he’s like a spider. He makes a web, a big intricate thing, then he sits on it and waits, legs on all the different threads, waiting for a change in the tension, the sign that his prey’s been snared.’
Hannah wrapped her arms around herself.
‘He’s a genius at it, actually. The long game. That’s why he never pushed me under the 2.10 from Brighton – it would have been over too quickly. More fun for him to see how he could screw me up over years and years. It was him who got me into drugs – he knew my personality, how easy I find it to get hooked. He could do it: smoke a bit of weed, take some E, get hold of the good stuff and make sure I was getting really into it, then stop. Meanwhile, there was I with a brand-new habit. You could count the number of times he did coke on your fingers, probably, but I . . . Well, it really messed me up. It wasn’t just . . . what happened. Before that, for years, I was hopeless. I lost job after job, barely scraped through my degree – there were days I just couldn’t get out of bed. And it wrecked me financially, of course – swallowed every penny I managed to earn.’
‘What about Jim Thomas?’ Hannah said. ‘Your neighbour.’
Nick looked at her. ‘Jim?’
‘What happened to his dog, the one that drowned? The papers said you did it but your mother told me it was a misunderstanding.’
‘No misunderstanding. Mark drowned Molly. He hated Jim, absolutely hated him – Jim was wise to him and he knew it.’
‘Your mother says you – the two of you – found her drowned.’
‘No, I found her drowned. I’d been with this girl after school and I was coming home the back way near the stream. Mark had put her in a bag with stones – when I came along he was cutting her out of it. I waded in but . . .’
‘Then why did people think you did it?’
‘Because I was the one with the wild reputation – the girls, the drugs, bunking off school.’
Hannah frowned. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’
‘Because he told me that if I did, he’d grass me up for selling weed at school, which I was doing. You see? This was what he was so good at – he knew everything, calculated everything. And everything could be tied back in to something else. The spider’s web.’
Hannah pointed at his cigarettes. ‘Can I?’
He pushed them across the table with his lighter. ‘He used to make out that I was some sort of wild animal – stupid, uncivilised. A brute.’ He took the packet back and got one out for himself. ‘Of course, the irony is, I am a brute now – ten years in prison brutalised me.’ He lit the cigarette, pulled smoke into his lungs and let it out in a long thin stream. ‘It was . . . if I imagined hell, I’d imagine prison. Wakefield’s where they keep the sex offenders, the rapists. It wasn’t Ford, with Jeffrey Archer knocking out a novel and a load of dodgy MPs playing ping-pong. No one warns you about the noise – all day, all night, the banging and knocking and shouting and singing, metal doors slamming, buzzers. I shared cells with people who were illiterate, disturbed. Ten years without privacy, counting the hours until you could go to bed and say you’d done another day. Not that there was sleep, even then. There was this one time . . .’
He stopped and she saw his whole body stiffen. Echoing through the house came the sound of the doorbell.