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 lock 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 again. ‘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.
She hadn’t heard it but Mr Reilly – her father-in-law – must have closed whichever door his wife had been behind because their voices, if they were speaking, were inaudible. The only sounds were the clock and the wind as it buffeted the front of the house. A draught stirred the bottom of the net curtain in the bay window.
After some minutes, there was movement in the corridor. Hannah turned and in the doorway behind her she saw a woman of seventy or so, her hands clasped together in front of her chest as if she were praying. Her face was heavily lined but Hannah could see that at least one thing Mark had told her was true: his mother had been beautiful. Her eyes were large and gentle, still a lovely deep blue behind her glasses, and her lips were soft and full. She was wearing pale pink lipstick – did she always wear it at home or had she just put it on? Her eyes were wet and Mr Reilly put a steadying hand on her shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We’re pleased to meet you but it’s . . . well, it’s a shock for us.’
‘No, I understand. For me, too – I didn’t know you were . . . here.’
‘This is my wife, Elizabeth. I’m Gordon.’
‘Hannah,’ she said to Mrs Reilly, who was looking at her with unabashed curiosity, taking her in, detail by detail.
‘How long have you been married?’ she asked. Her voice was quiet, with a hasty, furtive quality, as if she were worried about drawing attention to herself and only dared speak quickly.
‘Since April. Not long.’
‘We didn’t even know.’
Hannah felt ashamed, as if she were to blame, but before she could say anything, the woman shook herself, said, ‘Tea,’ and whisked away like the White Rabbit.
Mark’s father came awkwardly into the room and gestured to the higher-backed of the armchairs. ‘Please sit down. I’ll put the fire on. We normally wait until the evening, the price of electricity these days, but it’s cold this afternoon. We’re quite exposed to the wind, here on the hill.’ At the far side of the fireplace, he hitched his trousers at the knee and bent slowly. The snap of a switch and then he straightened, came round to the front and pressed the button on the outdated two-bar electric heater set into the grate. He stood back and watched, as if he’d laid a real fire and wanted to make sure it would go. ‘There,’ he said with satisfaction when the ends of the coils started to redden.
A fussy chintz pelmet hid the bottom of the armchair and it wasn’t until she’d sat down and it lurched alarmingly that Hannah realised it was some sort of rocker.
‘Sorry, I should have said. That’s Elizabeth’s chair – I forget it does that.’
‘I shouldn’t take it if it’s her’s. Here, let me . . .’
‘No, no.’ He motioned her back down. ‘It’s the best one – she won’t be happy unless you have it.’ He took a seat himself on the far end of the sofa, smoothed his trousers and looked at her. Hannah smiled at him and he smiled back, Mark at seventy. Struggling for something to say, she felt a dizzying sense of vertigo. Why had she come in? She’d found out what she’d wanted to know: they were alive. Wasn’t that enough?
The clock ticked on, measuring the silence.
‘Have you come from London?’ he said.
‘Yes, just now. The roads were terrible – the traffic, I mean.’ Traffic? She stopped before she could say anything even more inane.
From the hallway came the rattle of china and Mrs Reilly entered with a tray that she lowered gingerly on to the copy of the Herald. ‘Oh, I should have asked, shouldn’t I?’ she said, face a picture of dismay. ‘Perhaps you’d prefer coffee?’
‘Tea’s fine – perfect. Thank you.’
She smiled gratefully. ‘How do you take it?’
Mr Reilly watched his wife as she poured milk into the bottom of a cup and topped it up with a weak stream of tea from a pot in a crocheted cosy. Hannah tried to imagine Mark in this room and failed. It was a struggle to imagine his world and this one even co-existing. She remembered him in Montauk, his almost animal energy as he’d jogged up the beach from the sea, the water furrowing his chest hair as he’d lowered himself down on to the sand.
The cup tottered on the saucer as his mother handed Hannah her tea. Elizabeth poured some for her husband and herself then sat next to him on the sofa, straightening her navy polyester skirt as if preparing to be interviewed or told off by the headmistress. Hannah searched for something to say but Mrs Reilly spoke first.
‘How did you meet, you and Mark?’ she said. ‘I’m sorry – do you mind me asking?’
‘No, of course not. I had a job in New York – advertising – and some friends of ours there introduced us. We hit it off and . . .’
‘New York,’ said Mr Reilly, as if he’d heard of it and didn’t much approve.
‘Last year – the summer before last. Mark was doing a big project with DataPro’s New York team and . . .’ The look on Gordon’s face told her he hadn’t known there was, or ever had been, such a thing.
‘And you were married in April this year?’ said Elizabeth Reilly.
‘Yes. In Chelsea, at the register office.’
‘Do you live in London now – with him? You’re not in America any more?’
‘No, I moved back a few months ago. It didn’t make sense living apart once we were married.’ She took a scalding sip of tea.
‘That’s right, isn’t it? No point being married at all if you’re not going to be together.’ Elizabeth glanced at her husband with a look that was almost shy. ‘Do you have children? No, of course you don’t – what am I saying? You haven’t been married long enough. Not that that matters,’ she said quickly, ‘being married, not these days . . .’ She trailed off, embarrassed. ‘Sorry.’
‘Don’t worry.’ Hannah smiled. ‘But no, we don’t.’
‘Would you like them?’
‘I . . . Well . . .’
‘Elizabeth, you shouldn’t put the woman on the spot like that,’ Mr Reilly cut in.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, looking mortified now. ‘It’s just I know so little about his life these days, what he’s doing, what he thinks about things . . .’
‘When did you last see him?
‘Ten years ago, at the trial . . .’ She faltered and looked at her husband aghast, as if she’d blown a terrible secret.
‘I know about Nick,’ Hannah said. ‘The court case. Patty Hendrick, I mean.’
‘We don’t talk about it,’ said Mark’s father, voice sharp. ‘I’m sure you understand. For us, it was . . .’ His voice trailed off. ‘And now this other one – the doctor, Hermione.’ He put his tea down, the china tinkling.
Mrs Reilly actually flinched. ‘Is that why you’re here?’
‘No.’ Hannah shook her head. ‘It’s nothing to do with Nick. I just—’
‘Then why?’ said Mr Reilly. ‘Why come now?’
‘Does he want to see us?’ Mark’s mother’s eyes lit up with sudden hope. ‘Is this his way of . . .?’
‘No,’ said Hannah as gently as she could. ‘I’m sorry.’
Mrs Reilly nodded but then dipped her head and focused on her hands.
The carriage clock struck the hour, three tiny cymbal crashes.
‘Mark’s hurt his mother very badly, as you can see,’ said his father. ‘I’m not saying there aren’t elements of his behaviour we understand – doesn’t he think we’d like to forget, too? – but even so . . .’ He looked at Elizabeth’s bent white head. ‘Nick was the perfect excuse,’ he added.
Hannah frowned. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Mark was looking for a reason to cut us off and Nick gave it to him.’
‘Why would he want . . .?’
‘He’s ashamed of us, isn’t he?’
‘I—’
‘Look at us. Look at how we live. Do you think he’d be proud of us? We’re an embarrassment to him – the boring, ordinary, petit bourgeois people – he called me that once, to my face – he had to leave behind in order to create whoever he is these days, Mr Big Shot. Look at us and then look at him with his success, his money, his lifestyle.’ Gordon’s voice was full of disdain. ‘You. With the greatest of respect, you seem decent but you don’t fit here – advertising, New York, the way you look. I knew he didn’t send you – he wouldn’t want you to see us, what he came from.’
‘No, I’m sure that’s not . . .’ Hannah started.
‘It is – if you’re his wife, you must know it is.’
‘I don’t blame him,’ said Mrs Reilly quietly. ‘Not for that. He’s worked so hard for what he has – all his life he’s worked hard. If he chooses to live in a certain—’
‘You don’t blame your son for scorning you?’ demanded her husband with venom. ‘For dismissing you from his life like an underperforming member of staff?’
‘Oh, Gordon, that’s not what I . . . Don’t make it sound like that, please don’t.’
‘It’s the truth, isn’t it? And she’s married to him; she knows what he’s like. Anyway, it’s not just about being ashamed, I’ve worked that much out. He wants to punish us, too, doesn’t he?’ He directed his question to Hannah.
‘For what?’ she said.
‘For not seeing it, for not understanding about Nick. He did, Mark, from very early on he got it, but to believe that one of your own children could be capable of . . .’ He looked sickened. ‘I hope you never know what it’s like, to have to face your neighbours, see them acting normal when you know they’ve been reading about your son in the papers, every sordid detail of what he did. That they all know what kind of monster you’d been . . . incubating.’
‘It must have been hard for Mark, too, having Nick as a brother,’ she said tentatively. ‘I mean, it sounds like he felt a lot of responsibility for . . .’
Mr Reilly gave a snort. ‘Responsibility? He was never responsible for Nick, never, whatever he might have told you. How could anyone be responsible for . . . that?’ He spat the word off his tongue.
‘It was my fault.’ Mrs Reilly looked up from her lap. ‘The way I handled them when they were growing up. When Nick was born, he was so easy. After Mark . . .’
‘Easy?’ Mr Reilly was outraged.
‘At the beginning, Gordon – when he was younger. That’s all I meant. He was easy,’ she said, directing herself to Hannah. ‘Mark was . . . different. Difficult – there, I’ve said it; he was difficult. Even when he was a baby, I felt like I was battling with him, like there was someone in there, an adult, looking out at me from his eyes, challenging me all the time. Judging me – that sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s what it felt like.’
‘Elizabeth . . .’
She glanced at her husband, her face anxious, but she carried on. ‘He was so bright – it was obvious right from the start that he was special. And then we had Nick – I got pregnant again almost straight away; they were born within a year of each other – and that’s when Mark started to change. I knew at the time I wasn’t treating them the same but I couldn’t help myself. Mark was . . . he seemed to want something from me that I couldn’t give him. He stopped sleeping, he wouldn’t feed, and then he started having moods, not tantrums like other children but moods – he used to disappear, go inside himself, as if he was trying to punish me. Nick was sunny, smiley, and . . . I couldn’t help it, he was easier to love, he just was.’
‘Elizabeth, stop,’ said Mr Reilly, but she ignored him.
‘Mark saw it,’ she said. ‘I know he did. He saw it and he felt rejected, and then he got angry, and the angrier he got, the harder it was to . . . get through to him. That was when it started – his shutting himself off from me. By the time he was five or six, he was closed, self-contained – like a bubble. He’d taken his world inside himself. He didn’t need me any more, or even want me, but Nick . . .’ She stood up suddenly, her movements much less of a struggle than her husband’s, went to the bureau and tugged open the lowest drawer. From underneath a stack of papers she pulled out a small navy blue photograph album.
‘Elizabeth, for pity’s sake.’
‘No, Gordon, I want to,’ she said. ‘I’m going to. He’s still my son.’
By the fireplace there was a chintz-covered footstool. She carried it round to the side of Hannah’s chair and sat down, avoiding eye contact with her husband, who stayed on the sofa radiating anger. The album was A5-size and covered in leatherette. Inside, the polythene envelopes that held each picture were misty and crackled with age. Mrs Reilly handled them with reverence as if, were she alone, she might caress each one before turning it over.
She paged through several then lifted the book on to the arm of Hannah’s chair. ‘We went camping in Devon, our summer holiday. He’s eight.’
The picture had been taken at the campsite and the background was dominated by a large square tent, inside the pinned-back door of which the silhouette of a man – Gordon, Hannah guessed – was visible leaning over a table. Mark sat in the foreground, just off centre, on a fold-out stool. He was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and as they protruded towards the camera, his knees were almost comically bulbous above his skinny shins. His expression, however, was deadly serious. The photographer – his mother, presumably – had called his name and he was looking up from the book in his lap with the weariness of an elderly scholar. It wasn’t tiredness, though. When Hannah looked again, she saw exactly what Elizabeth Reilly meant: he was closed off. Having no choice in the matter, he was there in person, his expression seemed to say, but the real him, the part that mattered, was somewhere else, locked up and unreachable, private.
‘You see?’ said Mrs Reilly. ‘And look – here.’ She flicked forward several pages to a picture of Mark in uniform, grey trousers and a grey V-neck sweater with a maroon stripe at the collar and cuffs, a rucksack at his feet. Another picture taken under duress: in this one, Mark’s anxiety to get away was palpable. He was at an angle to the camera, his shoulder already turned, his weight on the back foot. Again his face was blank, closed, but this time there was something else, almost masked but definitely there: disdain.
‘His first day at senior school,’ his mother said. ‘I just wanted one picture, a record, but—’
‘That’s enough,’ snapped Mr Reilly. ‘The woman hasn’t come here to sit and maunder over old photographs.’
Hannah felt an urge to protect his wife, shield her from his corrosive anger. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Nice, I mean. I’ve only ever seen a couple of pictures of him when he was young. It’s good to . . .’
‘I’m amazed he has any at all. Or perhaps he likes them – maybe they’re part of his creation myth: look at what he had to overcome to get to where he is today,’ scoffed Mr Reilly.
Next to Hannah, Mrs Reilly gave a quiet sob.
Outside, there was a gust of wind and then a sudden sharp cracking sound as if someone had thrown a handful of gravel against the bay window. Hail – the clouds that had been gathering all afternoon had finally reached critical mass. In seconds the room was dark.
Mark’s mother closed the album and returned it to the bureau, stashing it back beneath the papers in the bottom drawer. When she turned around, she looked at Hannah, avoiding her husband’s eye. ‘Would you like to see his room?’
From deep in Mr Reilly’s throat came a sound of disgusted resignation.
Outside in the hall, his wife gave Hannah a look that mixed gratitude with a hint of conspiracy and led her to the back of the house. Through a half-open door Hannah caught a glimpse of a small, neat kitchen with units so dated they had to be from the sixties. Outside the last door Mrs Reilly paused, her hand on the cheap handle. ‘I haven’t changed it,’ she said. ‘It’s exactly how it used to be.’ She lowered her voice until it was almost a whisper. ‘Gordon doesn’t like it, it makes him angry, but I won’t let him touch it.’ There was unexpected fire in her eyes as she pressed down the handle and ushered Hannah inside.
For a second or two she was confused. The room was schizophrenic. One half of it had clearly been a teenage boy’s: there was a huge, obsolete black stereo with a stack of CDs; a punch-ball on a stand; and, beneath a behemoth of a television with a back about two feet deep, some sort of games console in a nest of cables. On the shelf above an ugly veneered desk, piles of GCSE Letts Revise guides and graffiti-covered exercise books kept company with a foot-long red model Ferrari and a stack of Loaded magazines.
The other half of the room was immaculate and almost empty. Both sides had single beds but where the first had a duvet in a charcoal-grey cover, this one had been made up with starched white sheets. This bedside table held a lamp with a wooden base and plain cloth shade, not an Anglepoise, and where the other half had posters of Bob Marley and generously endowed women in impractical swimwear – how Mrs Reilly must love those, Hannah thought – here the walls were bare. The shelf above an identical ugly desk was empty apart from a box-file like the one Mark used for his financial papers.
‘They had to share,’ Mrs Reilly said. ‘We’ve only got two bedrooms.’
‘Mark’s side?’ Hannah indicated the cluttered half, thinking that his mother must have cleared Nick’s in horror after he went to prison, but Mrs Reilly shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, ‘this is Mark’s.’
‘I thought you hadn’t changed it?’ Hannah frowned.
Again Mrs Reilly shook her head. ‘I haven’t. He took his clothes and books when he went up to Cambridge, but otherwise this is how he kept it.’
‘It’s very . . . tidy,’ Hannah said, as the word ‘monastic’ came into her mind. That wasn’t right either, though. That implied asceticism, but the white sheets and plain lamp suggested a deliberate aesthetic, a less-is-more minimalism.
‘He left this,’ said Mrs Reilly. Turning, Hannah saw that she’d taken the box-file down from the shelf. ‘I found it pushed right back underneath the chest of drawers just after he went to college. He wrote to me, actually, asking me to send it on to him, but I said no, he could come and collect it himself if he wanted it so badly.’ She gave a small smile, embarrassed by her show of toughness but proud of it, too. ‘It was a lure – I knew he wouldn’t visit otherwise.’ She gave a small shrug. ‘It didn’t work, obviously.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, that’s it,’ said Mrs Reilly. ‘When I found it hidden like that, I thought it must be something important or . . . embarrassing.’ She cast a quick glance in the direction of one of the well-endowed ladies on the wall. ‘But it’s not. It’s just pictures, pages torn out of magazines and the like.’ She opened the box and lifted a slim bundle of papers out on to the desk. ‘Look.’ She slid it across.
On top, Hannah saw, its paper brittle now more than twenty years later, was an advert for aftershave, one of the exclusive small-batch types only for sale at Harrods or Harvey Nicks. The black-and-white picture showed a woman in a white silk dress standing barefoot on the deck of a beautiful wooden yacht. The same breeze that wrinkled the water lifted her long hair away from the smooth length of her back. A square-jawed man was emerging from the cabin with a couple of drinks and a knowing smile. The mood was romantic, cheesy, and utterly aspirational. Wear this aftershave, the picture said, and this life will be yours: the gorgeous, aloof woman; the antique yacht; sundowners on the Riviera.
Turning over, Hannah found a piece that she guessed had been torn from an interiors magazine showing an amazing glass house – laughably referred to as a summer cabin – on a island off the coast of Norway. Next was a yellowing Sunday Times review of a restaurant in Bruges with pictures of a spectacular dining room, and then an interview with the family who ran La Colombe d’Or hotel in St-Paul-de-Vence – with a jolt, Hannah remembered Mark talking about it only a month or so ago, saying he’d always wanted to go. There were pictures of a London townhouse not dissimilar to the one in Quarrendon Street – the kitchen in particular was very like theirs, with a slate floor and long farmhouse table – and a huge apartment in the Dakota Building with views of Central Park. Near the bottom of the pile was a run of pages with pictures of an old Jaguar XJS, and then, the final sheet, a Knight Frank advertisement, like the ones she saw in back issues of Country Life at the dentist, for an eight-bedroomed Tudor house in Gloucestershire, complete with walled gardens and a tennis court.
‘Expensive tastes even as a teenager,’ said Mrs Reilly at her shoulder. ‘It’s lucky he turned out to be so successful, isn’t it?’
Hannah had a sudden memory of the first night on the beach at Montauk with Mark, their conversation about living in New York. ‘I used to sit in my bedroom at home,’ he’d said, ‘devising ways I could make it happen.’ There was nothing lucky about it, she thought; he’d made sure he was successful. The boring, ordinary, petit bourgeois people he had to leave behind.
Mrs Reilly was looking at her. To hide her face, Hannah went to the window. Like the area at the front of the house, the garden was mostly lawn, a narrow stretch of twenty-five or thirty metres extending to a flimsy panelled fence, interrupted only by a cheap wooden bird-table. The hail hammered down on a skirt of crazy paving around the house. Just beyond the fence that divided their garden from their neighbour’s, she could see the pitched roof of a small garden shed.
‘It must have been very hard for you,’ she said, trying to sound non-committal.
‘The trial?’ said Mrs Reilly.
‘Yes, but even before that. Mark’s told me what Nick was like as a teenager, how wild he was.’
‘He was a handful,’ she agreed, nodding.
‘It sounds like it was a little more than that.’
Mrs Reilly frowned. ‘He was badly behaved when it came to girls, yes, I have to admit, and beyond a certain age, it was a struggle to get him to go to school, but otherwise . . .’
Hannah looked at the shed. ‘What about Jim Thomas?’ she said. ‘Your old neighbour.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t Nick who didn’t get on with Jim,’ said Mrs Reilly brightly. ‘That was Mark.’
Hannah felt the cold sensation on the back of her neck. ‘But the fire in his shed on the allotment?’ she said. ‘And what happened to his dog.’
‘The fire was an accident.’ Mrs Reilly picked up the pile of papers and dropped them smartly back into the box-file. ‘They’d been smoking in there to annoy Jim – that was bad of them, I know – and they hadn’t put a cigarette out properly. We paid to replace the shed – Jim ended up better off, I should think. The old one was quite shabby and . . .’
‘His dog?’ Hannah pressed.
Mrs Reilly’s face tightened. ‘That whole thing was . . . a misunderstanding. They just found Molly. They didn’t have anything to do with her drowning.’
At the door Mr Reilly gave Hannah a hard look. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said. ‘Why did you come here?’
She looked him in the eye as a volley of hail hit the patterned glass behind her. She couldn’t tell him the truth: it would devastate Mrs Reilly to know what Mark had said. ‘Because I was curious,’ she said. ‘You’re my husband’s parents and I’d never met you.’
He stared back but the answer seemed to have enough of the truth in it to satisfy him. ‘He told you we were . . . estranged?’
‘Estranged. Yes.’
‘And the timing? I don’t believe this has nothing to do with what’s just happened. You’ve been married and living in London for months and we’ve never heard of you, and now Nick’s out of prison, suddenly you’re on our doorstep.’
‘Okay,’ Hannah said evenly. ‘Yes, I’ll admit that there’s a connection. I wanted to know about Nick.’ She made herself hold eye contact. ‘Mark doesn’t talk about his brother, won’t – I found out about Patty Hendrick purely by chance. And now another woman’s dead and the police are on our doorstep and I don’t know anything about him.’
‘He’s a killer,’ Mr Reilly told Hannah, and next to him, Elizabeth flinched. ‘What more do you need to know? He’s a killer and we’re a killer’s parents.’
Hannah slammed the car door, put her seatbelt on and programmed the GPS to ‘Home’. Then she stopped. Where was she actually going to go tonight?
She rested her forehead on the top of the steering wheel. With a sudden burst of longing she thought about her life in New York – her friends, her apartment, her job – she hadn’t realised it at the time, of course, but everything had been so simple then. She saw her office with its huge glass desk and haphazard piles of papers and books and magazines; the view of the Empire State Building from the corridor just outside. Her assistant, Flynn, with his so-ugly-it’s-got-to-be-cool wardrobe and lengthy oral reviews of whatever pop-up restaurant had opened in Greenpoint over the weekend. She’d moaned to Roisin sometimes about the weeks that passed in a blur of work but, right now, she’d give anything to be back there, strung out on coffee, pulling an all-nighter; to wake up in the apartment on Waverly and find that this whole situation – Even Mark? said the voice. Your marriage? – was just a Bobby Ewing-style alternative storyline, a nightmare.
The wind threw another stinging rash of hail against the windscreen and Hannah had a new thought. Slowly she raised her head from the wheel. If their parents weren’t dead, then where the hell had Nick got a quarter of a million pounds? Mark had said it was his share of their parents’ estate, money from the sale of the house, but it couldn’t have been, could it? Their house was right here – they were in it.
She tried to think. Nick hadn’t earned that money himself, that was for sure, not by legitimate means, anyway: the newspapers had backed Mark up on that point, talking about his inability to hold down a job and how he’d taken hand-outs from his mother to pay the rent on his flat in Borough. Unless Mark had paid him a huge bonus at some point – and that seemed very unlikely – the only way Nick could have had that sort of money was if he’d been into something illegal. Hannah felt a wave of pure exhaustion: at this point, she thought, she wouldn’t be surprised if she found out there was no money involved at all.
‘Oh, it wasn’t Nick who didn’t get on with Jim’ – she heard Mrs Reilly’s bright tone and deliberately blotted it from her mind. No, not yet; she wasn’t ready.
Getting out her phone, she sent Tom a text: Can I stay with you tonight? In the car now but will explain when I see you. Really need to talk.
She put the phone on the passenger seat where she could see it and turned on the engine. The car had grown cold while she’d been inside and her breath had fogged up the glass. The chamois-leather sponge she kept for the purpose had rolled into the footwell on the other side and she undid her seatbelt and reached for it. She was straining, her hand almost on it, when there was a sharp rap behind her. Jerking upright, she saw Elizabeth Reilly’s desperate face pressed against the glass. Hannah’s nerves were so jangled, she shrieked in alarm.
She rolled down the window. Mark’s mother had left the house in a hurry, it seemed: she hadn’t put her coat on but was holding it over her head like a shield. She pulled it forward now to protect her eyes from the hail bouncing off the car roof.
‘I know you need to go,’ she said, voice nearly drowned out by the radio-static noise of it, ‘but I had to try . . . I shouldn’t ask you, put you in a difficult position like this, but . . . can you help us? Me – it’s just me. Gordon doesn’t want to see him, he’s too angry, but I . . . I miss my son.’ She started to cry.
Over her shoulder, Hannah saw Mark’s father standing on the doorstep, watching. ‘Mrs Reilly,’ she said, ‘you’re getting soaked. Why don’t you get in? We can talk in here, in the dry.’
She shook her head vehemently. ‘No, I can’t – Gordon . . . Look, I don’t care if he looks down on us,’ Elizabeth said, ‘Mark, I mean. Whatever Gordon says, I don’t care. I’m sixty-eight; I haven’t seen my son for ten years. I just don’t want to die without seeing him again.’ She looked Hannah in the eye, begging her.
Water was coursing down the gutter, bubbling into a drain somewhere underneath the car. The shoulders of her cardigan were soaked through.
‘I’m not asking for a miracle,’ she said. ‘I know nothing’s going to make it right. But if you could try – if you could ask him if he’d see me, just once. He doesn’t have to come here – I can come to him, to London, anywhere. I’ll find a way.’
Hannah reached through the window and touched her forearm, felt the bone even through the cardigan and the sleeve of the blouse underneath. ‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘I can’t promise anything but—’
‘Thank you. Oh, thank you.’ To Hannah’s surprise, Mark’s mother ducked her head through the window and kissed her quickly on the cheek. ‘You don’t know what that means.’
‘Elizabeth!’ Gordon’s voice over the noise of the hail. ‘Come inside – you’ll catch your death.’