Before We Met: A Novel (22 page)

Tonight she’d read coverage from broadsheets and tabloids, the websites of TV channels and news magazines, until after a while she’d thought there were no more grim details to discover. Then, just as she was about to force herself to turn off the computer, she’d found a feature-length story published in the news review section of a Sunday broadsheet the weekend after Nick’s conviction. The headline was
A Death in Chelsea
.

The piece started with a portrait of Patty, many of the details now so familiar to Hannah that she was beginning to feel as if she’d actually known her growing up: her father’s job as the chief executive of an electronics company in Hemel Hempstead; her stay-at-home mother and her brother, Seb, two years younger and identified as a future track star by the age of ten; the six-bedroomed house in a small village outside St Albans, with its swimming pool and the long paddock where Patty kept her ponies, Mischief and then Gorgeous Gus. Hannah knew about the gymkhanas and the summer sailing camps and the house in the Dordogne that Richard and Lara Hendrick had bought when their daughter was twelve, and she knew about the mediocre grades that made it obvious from early on that Patty’s childhood dream of becoming a vet would stay a dream.

The fact that she had been a willing sexual partner at the beginning of that nightmarish weekend had deterred the papers that trumpeted their ‘family values’ from the usual hagiography of the victim, but this journalist, Carole Temple, had talked to several childhood friends who described Patty’s tender heart and many acts of generosity. One told the story of how she’d started visiting an elderly widow in the village and then, when she’d learned that the woman loved books but was losing her sight, had begun reading to her every Sunday afternoon.

While pretending pity, most of the other pieces had related Patty’s fall from grace with relish, detailing her friendship with the ‘wilder element’ at her exclusive but not very academic girls’ school, the slipping of her grades, her experimentation – why did they always use that word? – with alcohol and marijuana. At that point, many of the articles made it sound as if the die were irrevocably cast, as if every teenage girl who’d ever taken a drag on an inexpertly rolled spliff in the company of a few sixth-form boys from the local comprehensive had set themselves on a road to perdition whose only destination was an early demise at the hands of a Bad Man.

Temple, however, had resisted the easy picture of the good-girl-gone-bad and instead asked questions about the expectations of a young woman like Patty, well brought up and attractive if not especially bright. What part did she see for herself in a society where women like her mother, who stayed at home and raised families, were routinely dismissed as pointless non-contributors? The intrinsic value of that role, argued Temple, its respectability, had been eroded to the point of non-existence, to an extent where it was no longer acceptable for a young woman to admit that she wanted to be a full-time mother. And what had replaced that position in the eyes of young women like Patty? A culture obsessed with celebrity and appearance, where the women most venerated in the media, and some of the highest paid, were those who posed for lads’ mags in G-strings, and fell drunkenly out of nightclubs. And the scorn levelled at any young woman perceived as not ‘up for it’ . . . So far from liberating girls like Patty, ladette culture, argued Temple, had enslaved them, turned them into walking, talking sex toys.

Hannah had assumed the piece would continue in the same feminist vein but, somewhat abruptly, the journalist had changed tack and moved on to Nick, who, in the photograph they’d used, appeared deeply tanned and laughing as he swung into the driver’s seat of a silver BMW convertible, a lovely Cotswold-stone house in the background.

In his case, too, it was clear that Temple had researched deeper and harder than the other journalists; there were several details that Hannah knew only because Mark himself had told her that night in New York. The sensational piece in the
Gazette
had mentioned Eastbourne, quoted old classmates of Nick’s probably contacted by phone, but Temple, it was clear, had been there.

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.

Cowering under a matching sky, the small grey pebbledashed bungalow, though immaculately maintained, seems an incongruous location for a boyhood that several who know the family describe as charmed or ‘golden’.

‘Nick was one of those children who seemed destined for a happy life,’ said a family friend who asked to remain anonymous. ‘He was a beautiful baby who grew into a beautiful little boy, always laughing, always smiling. We used to say to Lizzie, his mother, that she should let him be a child model – he would have made a fortune.’

‘He was bright as a button,’ said Leigh Stanton, his first teacher at primary school. ‘Learning came easily to him – he was a joy to teach. He read and wrote early and he was interested in everything. The only challenge was getting him to sit still – he was always restless, full of energy – and telling him off was next to impossible when he looked up at you with those big brown eyes.’

If Reilly’s early childhood was charmed, however, by the time he left junior school, there were troubling signs. Though no one interviewed for this piece was willing to be quoted, a number of people hinted at Elizabeth Reilly’s shyness and lack of confidence, and her emotional reliance on her younger son. Others voiced reservations about the way she lavished attention on the boy and showered him with toys and gifts that many were surprised the family could afford. His brother Mark, a year older, seems not to have been indulged to the same extent.

Perhaps his status as the spoiled younger child contributed to the wild streak that Nick started to exhibit as his teenage years began, or at least to his apparent indifference to the consequences of his actions, alluded to by many people who knew him. That sense of being untouchable – of living outside the rules or even, finally, the law – was to become one of Reilly’s defining characteristics.

The first indication that something was wrong was a falling-off in his attendance record during his third year at secondary school. Truant officers soon became regular visitors to the bungalow. ‘It got to the stage,’ said Matt Trenton, a classmate, ‘where he wasn’t allowed to get the school bus any more and his dad had to drive him and walk him in through the front door, which Nick hated, obviously. It made no difference: by breaktime, he’d be gone, out the door again. He used to hang around down on the beach and drink or smoke weed. Sometimes, he said, he got the train into Brighton to play arcade games.’

At fourteen, he was excluded from school for a week for verbally abusing a teacher who had embarrassed him in front of his classmates.

There were hints, too, of darker troubles. Two long-term residents of his parents’ quiet street remember tensions between Nick and Jim Thomas, an elderly neighbour, now deceased, who took issue with the teenager’s habit of using his back garden as a short-cut to the street behind.

‘Nick used to jump over his back fence,’ one recalled. ‘It scared the living daylights out of Jim, turning the light on to find Nick standing on his back patio staring in through the kitchen window. Jim had an old shed at the end of the garden, near where Nick used to come in, and several times he said he found drug paraphernalia on the bench inside. When he complained to Gordon and Elizabeth, they were very apologetic, they always were, but nothing seemed to change. Lizzie always excused his behaviour as teenage hi-jinks but it was clearly more than that.’

What passed between Nick and Jim Thomas is still the subject of local speculation but six weeks after Thomas’s complaint to the Reillys, the shed on his allotment was found ablaze. Three weeks after that, Thomas’s dog, a Red Setter named Molly, was found drowned on the bank of a stream that runs close to the houses. Nick had played truant from school that afternoon and had earlier been seen on the street wearing jeans soaked to the thigh. Neighbours recall a tearful Thomas banging on the Reillys’ front door but though the police were called, for reasons that remain unclear no charges were pressed. Reilly’s immunity held firm.

Classmates at his senior school describe Nick Reilly as charismatic and entertaining, though they struggle to remember who his particular friends were among the other boys. Clearly, however, by the later years of school he was a major success with his female contemporaries, a fact perhaps unsurprising given his looks, reported charm, and the second-hand orange Triumph Spitfire that arrived outside the bungalow on his 17th birthday, courtesy of his mother.

If he had no particular friends among the boys, it seems also that he had no particular favourite among the girls, instead spreading his favours equally between the best-looking and most popular members of his own year and the one above. Reilly had been sexually active since the age of 13, but relationships were short-lived and casual, at least on his side. Though there is no suggestion of a causal connection, he is believed to have had a brief relationship with Emma Simpson, a lovely but emotionally fragile girl who committed suicide not long after they parted company.

Despite his poor school attendance record, Nick’s natural academic ability was enough to secure him the grades for a place at university in Leeds, where he studied economics, ‘at least nominally’, says Rachel Jenkins, a fellow student on the course. He soon became a fixture on the city’s vibrant party scene, where his use of alcohol and drugs – constants in his life for several years by that point – really took off. He graduated with a third-class degree, which many considered him lucky to get at all. Reilly was reportedly angered by the result, however, and demanded his papers be remarked. His grade remained the same.

As soon as exams were finished, he vacated his student digs in Headingley and moved south again to London. Most of his university contemporaries reduced the high costs of London living by renting houses together but Nick took a one-bedroomed flat in Borough where he lived for the next three years.

How he paid for the flat is not clear. He is known to have received financial support from his mother but not enough, it would seem, to cover life in central London. His employment record during these years was patchy at very best and included brief stints as an assistant in a high-profile PR firm, an estate agency and a record company.

He had no difficulty getting jobs – his charm made him a natural at interviews – but keeping them was another matter. The issue was his work ethic. A fellow employee at the estate agency recalled: ‘He was late every day, took long lunches and called in sick three times in his first fortnight. He just didn’t seem to care.’

Then, at the age of 26, Reilly started working with his brother, Mark, and seemed at last to have found something that held his interest for more than a couple of weeks.

In marked contrast to Nick, Mark Reilly had, by the age of 27, achieved tremendous success. After taking a first-class engineering degree at Cambridge, he had come to London and begun raising the capital that allowed him to start DataPro, a company that designs custom-made software for banks and brokerage firms in the City and, these days, around the world. Within three years, the company was generating an annual turnover close to £5 million.

Nick Reilly was employed as a project manager at DataPro and his job was to win new business for the firm and ensure good working relationships with clients. He seemed initially successful in the role.

He received a handsome six-figure salary, which funded the lifestyle that has already been widely reported in the press: the flat just off the King’s Road in Chelsea, a new Porsche, frequent visits to top London restaurants and nightclubs, and skiing in Val d’Isère where parties at his rented chalet, fuelled by cocaine and unending streams of vodka and champagne, often lasted until noon the following day. Women – party girls, a model, two junior employees from the same fashion magazine – came and went, none of them lasting long enough to make an impression.

Nick Reilly had found his element.

In court this week Jonathan Hepperton QC, prosecuting, said: ‘In Nicholas Reilly we see a man who is arrogant almost beyond belief, entirely careless of others, ultimately amoral. He is the embodiment of a sense of entitlement, a man who views life as a series of opportunities for him to take what he wants, putting his own pleasure above all other considerations, no matter what the cost to those around him.’

Those people include his brother Mark who in January this year took a rare weekend away from work and accepted Nick’s invitation to join him in Val d’Isère. It was in the queue for a ski lift that Mark met Patty Hendrick, also there for a long weekend. The pair shared a lift and clearly enjoyed each other’s company enough for Mark to suggest they meet for a drink that evening. Back in London, they began meeting regularly.

The relationship was not serious but there was a clear attraction between the handsome, successful Reilly and the pretty, vivacious Patty. ‘They had fun together,’ said Jamie Hancock, a friend of Mark’s. ‘Mark had been working very hard for years at DataPro and before that at Cambridge, and Patty offered him a chance to blow off steam. She might not have been his intellectual equal or his soulmate, but neither of them was looking for that. It was about fun.’

The events of the night of 7 March and the following 48 hours reflect well on none of the key players. The revelation that Mark Reilly had sex with Patty in the lavatories of the club before she left with Nick has challenged the public perception of the senior Reilly as a decent man who fell victim to his brother’s remorseless sexual appetite and instead helped paint a portrait of a group of people for whom anything went.