The bathroom door opened and Mark emerged in a cloud of steam scented with his sage cologne, a towel wrapped round his waist. The hair on his chest was matted with water.
‘It’s Saturday,’ she said.
‘I know, and I hate leaving you, I really hate it, but it’s just a few more days.’ He looked at The Times that had been delivered with the breakfast tray. Nick and Hermione were on page seven. ‘I was lying awake all night thinking about it,’ he said. ‘If the papers are using the old photographs of him, it means they’re looking at the old stories, doesn’t it? David got a call from a guy at the FT yesterday who’d heard a rumour about the buy-out – if someone puts two and two together and Kevin Meyer at Systema hears about it, we’re buggered. I’ve got to get this deal done before it all blows up in our faces, and the only thing I can do until Tuesday is make sure everything’s ready.’
He bent to get his jeans out of his bag. ‘Why don’t you give your brother and Lydia a ring? I’d feel better if I knew you weren’t on your own. You could go over to theirs or have lunch somewhere, go to a gallery. That new Matisse show must be open now – I don’t mind if you see it first.’
‘I’m meant to be seeing Tom for a drink on Monday. But, yes, I’ll ring him.’
‘Good.’ Mark pulled a jumper over his head then picked up his phone and car keys from the bedside table. ‘It might be later rather than sooner this evening, maybe sevenish. Perhaps you could take me for another spin in your new wheels when I get back?’
He smiled and she smiled back, trying to look natural. ‘I should think that could be arranged.’
The car. In the strange hinterland between wakefulness and sleep this morning, she’d really wondered for a moment whether she’d dreamed it. It was gorgeous, exactly what she would have chosen herself if she’d ever had that sort of money to spare, but the suddenness of it, the fact that he’d bought it without telling her, and that it had arrived now, in the middle of all this, made it feel odd and unreal. They’d driven out towards Heathrow last night so she could try it on the motorway and as she’d accelerated, feeling the power of the engine as it went from seventy to eighty, almost to ninety, without any strain at all, she’d felt as if she’d stolen it.
‘Will you text me when you know where you’re going to be?’ he said.
As soon as the door closed after him, silence flooded the room. She put the television on and left the bathroom door open so she could hear it while she showered. Shutting her eyes, she let the water drum on her face. In the surprise and confusion about the Audi last night it had been pushed to the back of her mind but during her now-usual early-hours vigil, it had come pressing on her again, even stronger, the nagging sensation that there was something she’d forgotten.
There was half a cup of coffee left in the breakfast pot, and when she was dressed she poured it and turned on her laptop. Opening Google, she typed in Nick and Patty’s names and started going through the links one by one, looking for the story that had used the picture of Nick with the sports car. Perhaps they’d be lucky and it would be one of the pieces that hadn’t mentioned DataPro directly, but either way, Mark was right: it could only be a matter of time before someone made the connection and the whole thing came out again. How much time, though, might make all the difference to whether or not he could get the deal done.
She clicked through fifteen or twenty stories before she found it and, when she did, she saw that it had been printed with the long Sunday news-review feature. Hannah was surprised by how accurately she’d remembered it: the silver car and the lovely golden-stoned house, Nick’s pale cotton shirt, its sleeves rolled back to the elbow.
Her eyes flicked to the start of the text. The curtains were drawn this week in the front windows of the two-bedroomed bungalow where Nicholas Reilly spent his childhood, as if his parents, who still live in the house, want to close their eyes against the reality of the crime of which their son was this week found guilty.
Who still live in the house – Hannah read it again, just in case, but she hadn’t made a mistake: according to the journalist, this Carole Temple, at the time Nick stood trial and went to prison, his parents were still alive. But that couldn’t be right. Since the very beginning, their second date at the Mulberry Street Bar back in New York, Mark had told her that his parents had died when he was in his mid-twenties, and when he’d told her the whole story on Tuesday – finally, said the voice in her head – he’d said it again: ‘I’m just glad that when it happened, the really bad thing we’d been waiting for, for all those years, my parents were already gone.’
She stood up and started pacing the small area of carpet in the centre of the room. The journalist was wrong, it was the only explanation: people didn’t make mistakes about when their parents died. Mark said that his had died when he was in his mid-twenties, a year apart, and he’d been thirty when Nick had gone to prison. She tried to remember the actual years of the senior Reillys’ deaths but found she couldn’t. Had he ever told her? He must have. But actually, why must he? She’d never pushed him for that kind of exact fact; what was relevant was how long ago it had been, what stage of his life he’d been at, and he’d told her that. She’d let him talk about them when he wanted to, at his own pace, trusting that gradually she’d get the full picture.
She sat back down, feeling a little better. The journalist had got her wires crossed; that was all. Patty’s death had happened not long after they’d died, a couple of years, maybe; perhaps Mark hadn’t sold the house immediately, or perhaps another older couple had moved in and Carole Temple had mistaken them for the Reillys. That was quite likely, wasn’t it? It was usually older people who lived in bungalows.
Hannah hit the back button and returned to the list of hits but as she clicked through the stories, realising now just how many had mentioned DataPro, she felt more and more uneasy. When she reached the Gazette piece with its Sick Nick headline and lurid capitals, she put her head in her hands.
She closed the page, shut her computer and stood up. She stacked the dirty dishes on the breakfast tray and put it outside the door. The corridor stretched away to left and right, empty. Back inside, she made the bed meticulously, plumping the pillows and smoothing the sheets until they were wrinkle-free. In the bathroom she drank a glass of water and rested her forehead against the cold glass of the mirror. Then she went back to her computer.
How did you find out when people had died? Into Google she typed ‘UK death records’. The first link was to the General Register Office, the official government site. She clicked on it and skimmed down the page until she found a link promising information on birth, marriage, death and adoption records. When it opened, however, there was no access to records, just advice on registering a new death.
The National Archives advertised themselves to people looking for records of a birth, marriage or death in England or Wales. Hatched, matched and dispatched – Hannah heard her own mother’s voice. The site was clearly designed for genealogical research but while marriage certificates could be viewed online, birth and death certificates could not. A section titled Indexes to Birth, Marriage and Death registrations (1837 to present) had a link to a site transcribing the Civil Register but she quickly discovered that so far, the transcription, at least for deaths, hadn’t progressed beyond 1970. If Mark’s parents had died when he was twenty-six or seven, say, she was looking for 1998 and 1999.
Findmypast.co.uk offered records to 2006. The search boxes on the home page asked for first and last names, the range of years in which the person might have died, the country within the UK and then the county. She filled them as far as she could, entering ‘Elizabeth Reilly’, 1995–2005, England and Sussex. There was a box for her year of birth, too, and Hannah tried to think. How old had Mrs Reilly been when she died? She had no idea. How old had she been when Mark had been born, then? They’d never talked about that, either. She made an estimate, working on the theory that the previous generation had had their children younger, on the whole. If she’d been twenty-six, for example, when she’d had Mark and he’d been twenty-seven when she died in 1999, she would have been born in 1946. God, if that was right, she’d died far too young – she’d only be sixty-six if she were alive now. Hannah entered 1946 with a range of five years on either side. She hit return and waited. No results found.
The coffee was stone cold but she took a sip and went back. Where had she gone wrong? Maybe it had been Elisabeth, not Elizabeth, though her name had been spelled with a ‘z’ in the news coverage. In a new window, she double-checked that Eastbourne was in Sussex then broadened the range of years in which Mrs Reilly might have died from 1990 – when Mark would have been only eighteen – to 2005. She gave the search for her year of birth a span of twenty years. No results found.
Going back again, she unchecked the boxes that stipulated precise matches only, allowing all variant spellings and abbreviations of the names Elizabeth and Reilly and widening the range of her possible birth year to twenty years either side of 1946. Mark had been born in 1972 so that had to cover it: if she’d been born in 1926, she’d have been forty-six when she’d had him, forty-seven when she’d had Nick the following year. If she’d been born in 1966, she would have had Mark at age six. Still nothing.
Maybe there was a problem with Elizabeth’s record. Hannah cleared the boxes and instead entered Mark’s father’s details, as far as she knew them, double-checking with Carole Temple’s feature, where people who knew the family unambiguously called him Gordon. She entered his year of birth as 1935, on the basis that he may have been older than his wife, and set the range at twenty years to either side, 1915 to 1955, making him somewhere between seventeen and fifty-seven when Mark had been born. No results.
Frustrated, Hannah cleared the boxes again and entered her own grandmother’s details, leaving ten years around the date of her death, though she knew it exactly, and twenty years around her date of birth. When she hit return, Margaret Hannah Simpson, died Gloucestershire, Malvern, 1989, came up straight away. A search for her grandfather was just as quick.
She stood and walked around for a moment, pulling the curtain aside and looking down into the street. Outside one of the Victorian terraced houses, a teenage boy was soaping an old Volvo at glacial pace, and further up, a woman in jeans and a fleece was opening her front door, a nest of Waitrose carrier bags around her feet. A normal Saturday morning. Hannah dropped the curtain and came back to the table. Either there was a problem with the Reillys’ records or she’d got something wrong. Maybe they hadn’t died in Eastbourne; maybe Mark had brought them to hospitals in London so that he could be close to them or get them private care. She tried new searches on that basis but again, got nothing.
Into a new Google window, she typed ‘UK electoral roll’. The snippet of text underneath the link to whitepages.co.uk assured her that using the electoral register was a reliable way to search for people. Her hope faded as she scanned a short introductory paragraph that told her the site used a database from 2002 but she typed Gordon Reilly’s name into the boxes at the top – Gordon was probably less common a name than Elizabeth – and added ‘Eastbourne’. She hit return with no great expectation but almost immediately a new page opened: ‘1 Match for Gordon Reilly in Eastbourne’. The box underneath gave an address.
Hannah frowned, went back to the search page and typed in ‘Elizabeth Reilly’. This time, the site found two people with that name in Eastbourne. One of them lived at the same address as Gordon.
Heart thumping now, she went back and double-checked. Yes, the database was from 2002, when Mark had been thirty, but how well maintained was it? Could their names have been left on there by mistake? Had word failed to reach the council when they’d died? At her old flat in Kilburn, polling cards used to arrive for former residents years and years after they’d moved out: the system definitely wasn’t watertight. Further on, however, she saw that the site was claiming to update its records quarterly.
The results page had three boxes giving name, address and telephone number. In the case of both Gordon and the Elizabeth who shared his address, the box for the telephone number was blank. Hannah leaned back in the chair and reached for her bag on the bed, hooking a finger through the strap and swinging it across into her lap. Finding her phone, she entered the number for Directory Enquiries. She paused briefly before making the call, checking her conscience, but discovered that every last vestige of guilt about investigating the Reillys had gone.
She gave the operator Gordon’s name and address and waited. The tapping of keys and then the woman came back on the line. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but that number’s ex-directory.’
Hannah thought. ‘Does that mean,’ she said, ‘that there’s definitely a Gordon Reilly at that address?’
‘That’s what the records say.’
‘Could you try Elizabeth Reilly, please? Same address.’
More tapping. ‘Yes, there’s an Elizabeth Reilly listed but again, it’s ex-directory.
‘Okay, thanks.’ Hannah hung up and started a text message. Morning, she wrote. A favour: if Mark rings, will you tell him I’m with you but I’m in the loo or I’ve popped to the shops with Lydia or something, then call me?
Within seconds, her phone started ringing. Tom’s number. She hesitated, torn between the urge to pick up and tell him everything, and the sudden time pressure: it was quarter past eleven already and Eastbourne was . . . what? An hour and a half’s drive from London? More, maybe. If she was going to get there and back by seven, she didn’t have a lot of time to spare, and no honest conversation with Tom at this point was going to be short. She let the phone ring and got ready to go. When she came out of the bathroom, the phone had stopped ringing for the third time and there was a text instead: What’s going on?
Perversely, she immediately felt better about dodging him: there was an obvious logic, surely, to finding out whether there actually was anything going on before she freaked her brother out. What? asked the snide voice in her head. Anything other than Nick being a killer, you mean?
She ignored it and tapped out a reply: Nothing going on, just need a bit of space today. Full explanation coming Monday, promise.
I don’t like it. Tom’s response was almost instant. But if you swear you’re telling me the truth, I’ll do it. And stop ignoring my calls.
Swear, she wrote, feeling guilty. And I will. Thanks, bro.