Before We Met: A Novel (20 page)

‘How did he take it?’

‘
He
was fine – actually, he laughed – but my mother, both my parents, were furious. I think they thought they’d finally got him sorted and here he was, back on their hands again. They asked me what kind of brother I was, to do that to him, what kind of person I was to fire one of my own family, and I just lost it, told them what I really thought of Nick and the way my mother had let him ride rough-shod over her, probably made him the person he was. They didn’t talk to me for a year afterwards.’

Hannah pulled her legs up and wrapped her arms round her knees. ‘But I still don’t see why you feel guilty. You couldn’t be expected to go on employing him if he was wrecking your business, and it sounds like your parents – definitely your dad – agreed with you about the way he’d treated your mother.’

‘I think they did. That isn’t what I feel bad about. I made it up with them eventually, and my father had a couple of Scotches at Christmas a couple of years after that and said that bringing up Nick had been a nightmare. It was what happened later, when my mother was dying. I told you she died after my dad?’

Hannah nodded.

‘I was with her that morning. Nick got there too late. He was having an affair with a woman in Brighton and her husband was away – too good an opportunity to pass up. He didn’t make it to the hospital till one, by which point Mum was gone. But she asked me that morning – she made me swear – to look after him.’

‘What did she mean by that? Surely you couldn’t . . .’

‘Give him another chance at DataPro. He’d been drifting ever since he left, doing a bit of one thing, getting fired, trying something else, never sticking at anything . . . and I think it worried her all the time she was ill – she couldn’t rest easy when Nick was still so unsettled. Things like that were important to her: she was very old-fashioned. I know it bothered her, for instance, that neither of us was married.’

‘Maternal classic.’

‘Anyway, I promised her. I swore. I swore to her that I would look after him. I wouldn’t give him money but I’d give him a job, and she said, “Thank you, Mark,” and about an hour after that, she died. I think it was the only thing I ever did that really touched her – made a difference.’ His voice cracked and he bent his head. Hannah heard him give a hard swallow and put her hand out to him, but he shook his head.

‘The thing is, after she died, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t let him come in and stuff things up, patronise me, help himself to the bank accounts – I just couldn’t do it. So the promise I made to her, I broke. I lied to my mother on her deathbed.’

The look on his face was so bleak, so full of self-hatred, that Hannah couldn’t stand it. She moved across the sofa now, kneeled upright and put her arms around him, holding him so tightly she could feel his ribcage even through the layers of his shirt and jumper. She pressed her face against the side of his neck and felt his pulse beat against her lips. For two or three minutes she held on to him, saying nothing but communicating, she hoped, that she understood and pitied him and loved him. When finally she pulled away, his cheeks were wet and she kissed them.

‘Where is he now?’ she asked gently.

‘I don’t know,’ he croaked, then cleared his throat. ‘I’m not sure. London, I think. A couple of years ago I bumped into an old friend of my dad’s and he seemed to think Nick was working for an estate agent in Highgate. But that was two years ago so . . .’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Chapter Twelve

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
.

Chapter Thirteen

PLAYBOY ‘MONSTER’ FOUND GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER

By:
Daily Mail
reporter

Published: 06.02 GMT, 17 November 2002

Nicholas Reilly was yesterday convicted of the manslaughter of Patricia Hendrick, whose body was discovered at his West London home in March this year.

Hendrick, 25, known by her friends as Patty, died after a 48-hour-sex, drink-and-drugs binge during which Reilly, 28, plied her with alcohol and repeatedly injected her with cocaine.

When Hendrick experienced breathing difficulties and then fell unconscious, Reilly failed to call an ambulance. Hendrick died shortly afterwards.

A post-mortem found the cause of death to be a pulmonary embolism brought on by an impurity in the drug.

At the time of her death Hendrick’s body bore the marks of rough and prolonged sexual activity, including extensive bruising, much of it intimate, and ligature marks around her wrists, ankles and neck.

Over the course of a trial whose details have often been distressing, the jury at the old Bailey heard how in the early hours of 7 March this year, Reilly and Hendrick, who at the time was dating the defendant’s brother, Mark, left the nightclub in East London where they had spent the evening with him and other mutual friends. Both were already drunk and high on cocaine.

The binge continued for two days at Reilly’s home in Chelsea. Reilly admitted giving the deceased large quantities of vodka and tequila and supplying her with repeated doses of amphetamines and cocaine to ‘keep the party going’.

Police who attended the scene testified that the ‘party’ had occurred largely in the defendant’s bedroom, where they discovered evidence of bondage and other sado-masochistic activity.

Though the sexual activity itself took place by mutual consent, at least initially, the defendant admitted that unbeknownst to Hendrick, he was using concealed cameras to film the encounter for later viewing. The final tape proved decisive in Reilly’s conviction, showing him administering intravenous doses of cocaine to Hendrick when she was too intoxicated to give her consent.

Police arrested him at the scene after calls from a downstairs neighbour disturbed by noise. He will be sentenced on Friday.

Speaking outside the court, investigating officer Detective Inspector Michael Iveson said, ‘This was a deeply disturbing case for all concerned. Though Ms Hendrick was initially a willing participant in the events that took place at Nicholas Reilly’s home, there can be no question that Reilly behaved in a depraved and inhuman manner, first by administering doses of cocaine and continuing sexual activity for his own pleasure after Ms Hendrick suffered breathing difficulties and began to lose consciousness. And secondly when, aware of the illegal nature of the drug-taking and his role in supplying Ms Hendrick, and afraid of the consequences, he failed to call for medical assistance.

‘This is a man who, even under the effects of sustained drinking and drug-taking, was able to calculate his own sexual gratification and freedom as worth more than the life of another human being. There can be no doubt that his callous failure to act resulted in Ms Hendrick’s death. He will no doubt spend a considerable length of time behind bars and we hope that Ms Hendrick’s friends and family will find some comfort in that.’

‘SICK NICK’ REILLY TAPED SEX ACTS

AS LOVER FOUGHT FOR LIFE

By:
Gazette
reporter

Published 17 November 2002

Perverted Nick Reilly shot secret footage of lover Patricia Hendrick as she lay dying.

Convicted of manslaughter yesterday at Winchester Crown Court, sick nick admitted to using secret cameras to film himself having rough sex with Patty, 25, as a cocaine-related blockage in her lungs left her fighting for life.

During the course of the trial, a horrified jury was forced to watch footage of monster Nick injecting a barely conscious Patty with more cocaine.

Even when Patty lost consciousness altogether, cowardly Nick, afraid of the consequences, failed to ring for an ambulance.