Before We Met: A Novel (25 page)

His hands were balled into fists on the table. Who was he talking to now, she wondered, trying to justify himself? His father? His mother? Or Nick?

‘My brother was amazed when he saw that side of me. In his mind, I was a loser: a worker, an effort-maker, a drone. I loved showing him that he was wrong, that I wasn’t boring – I think it encouraged me. I loved showing him that women found me attractive, too, that he wasn’t the only one who could go into a club, flirt with a pretty girl and take her home. Of course,’ Mark said, dryly, ‘as it transpired, our style of taking girls home was somewhat different.’

He turned his head and looked at her. ‘I’m sorry, Hannah, I feel like a shit telling you this. I feel like I’m disrespecting you – us, our marriage – but now we’re talking about it, I want you to know everything, the whole thing. I need to get it over with once and for all. I wasn’t a saint, I’d be lying if I let you think that.’

‘I’m an adult. I can handle it.’

He gave a single nod. ‘Okay, but it wasn’t just a flash in the pan. My . . . behaviour had been going on for a couple of years by the time I met Patty. We met in France, skiing – Nick had got into the habit of renting a chalet for three or four weeks a season and I went over there now and again.’

‘That was in the papers, too.’

‘Of course – no stone left unturned.’ He reached out and ran his fingertip around the rim of the empty glass. ‘Patty was lovely, Han – sweet. That was why I liked her. Yes, she wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box and we were never going to be serious but, despite the party-girl behaviour you’ve no doubt read about, there was something sort of . . . innocent about her.’

Remembering the photographs she’d seen, the puppy-fat curves, Hannah felt a stab of pain.

‘She was a decent person,’ he said, ‘just young and a bit lost. But she was lovely-looking, too, and of course Nick noticed. The added bonus, as far as he was concerned, was that I was fond of her – not in love with her, not even close, but I liked her. It stuck in his craw having to do what I told him at work – he hated me having that power. A pretty girl and an opportunity to show me who was still top dog? Two birds with one stone.’

Mark reached for the bottle and poured himself another half-inch of Armagnac, most of which disappeared in the first swig. When he started talking again, his voice was harder. ‘I can’t stand thinking about that night,’ he said. ‘It was all so . . . sordid. Not just Nick, what happened to Patty, but my part in it, too.’

‘Tell me,’ she said calmly, but inside she was begging:
Please. Please don’t let there be anything else.

‘A friend of Nick’s had just bought this club in Shoreditch and so we all piled over there. We were wasted before we even arrived – we’d had cocktails first and, of course, every time you went out with Nick there were drugs. Coke, mostly, but he was into E as well and speed now and again. Patty and I had had some charlie and . . . I should have recognised the signs. Why didn’t I recognise the bloody signs?’

He looked up at her as if he expected an answer. Hannah stayed silent.

‘He’d been flirting with Patty from the moment she arrived at the bar, but that was nothing unusual. It was this look he gave me. We were in a stall in the toilets, doing a last couple of lines before we went on to the club, and Nick looked up at me with this look on his face. I’ll never forget it – I actually dream about it sometimes. It was like . . . this sounds crazy but it was like a carnival mask, one of those ones with the exaggerated, leering features, all nose and eyes and this horrible, curling mouth showing his teeth.’ Mark shuddered.

‘Anyway, not long after we got to the club, Patty and I ended up having sex in the toilets – no doubt you read about that, too. It tells you everything you need to know about that night, doesn’t it, that so much of it took place in toilets? I can’t remember how it happened, whose idea it was, but it happened and we came back out and I went off to the bar. It took a while, there was a queue, and then I bumped into this guy who was on a team we’d done some business with a few months beforehand. By the time I got back with the drinks, Nick and Patty had disappeared and no one else could look me in the eye.’ He ran his fingers backwards over his head and clenched them in his hair. ‘God, I wish I still smoked.’

‘We’ve got some – Tom left them.’

‘No, I think I might actually throw up. Talking about it like this . . .’ He shook his head. ‘The thing is, Hannah, the whole thing, Patty’s death – it was my fault.’

‘What?’ She heard outrage in her voice. ‘No. No, Mark.
He
did it. He was the one who . . .’

‘I let him. I’m the responsible one, remember? I’d known him my whole life. It wasn’t just that look that should have alerted me; it had been building for a long time. It’s always like that with Nick: you get a period of relative calm –
relative
,’ Mark put his hands up, qualifying, ‘and then he either gets bored or something in him comes to a head and then it’s . . . a crisis. In the weeks before it happened, there had been plenty of signs, if only I’d bothered to pay attention. He’d been turning up later and later to work, hungover as a dog; he’d missed a key meeting with his biggest client; and then there was the evening he hit on another client’s wife at a restaurant, groped her in the corridor – you know about that?’

She nodded.

‘And it wasn’t just work. He was taking stupid personal risks, too. He’d bought this huge bike, a Yamaha, and one night we’d all been out and he phoned me the next morning from Scotland – he’d got home at two in the morning and decided it would be fun to go to Edinburgh. He’d been smashed off his face but somehow he’d managed to get there alive – bloody miracle. Anyway, I should have known – no, I did know – that he was heading for some kind of . . . event.’

‘There’s still no way it’s your fault.’

‘But I think it is. There was this one moment that night. I stood there in the club after they’d gone and I thought about that look –
I’m going to fuck you up
– and I thought about how gullible Patty was, how keen she was to prove to him that she was fun, up for anything, and I just decided stuff them, stuff them both, they were on their own. I knew she was wrecked, I’d been with her all night – I should have rung her and made sure she was all right. Actually, I should have gone after them, but I was so angry, so furious, that I didn’t. I left her to Nick’s tender mercies. And look how tender they were.’

He hung his head, hiding his face. Silence rushed in around them, the deadening silence that Hannah had only ever felt in the house before when she was alone. She looked at his rounded shoulders, the curve of his back, and the word
defeated
came into her mind.

‘You know,’ he said, puncturing the silence, ‘I
wanted
something bad to happen to Nick. I wanted him punished for all the crap I had to put up with: his shitty, cruel behaviour; his manipulation of our mother; the fact that she spoiled him, not me; because he got all the attention and the toys and the money and the cars. I wanted him to suffer for the fact that our parents seemed to think I was born to be his caretaker. I had to dance on the fucking moon if I wanted to drag their eyes away from him even for a minute. So I wanted Nick to be taught a lesson in a way he wouldn’t forget.’

‘Ten years in prison,’ she said quietly.

‘I got what I wanted, didn’t I? But look at the price, Hannah. Look at the damage. Patty
died
– she died that night. Twenty-five, and they dug a hole in the ground and buried her. If I hadn’t let anger and my stupid, stupid bloody
pride
stop me going after them, she’d still be alive.’

When Hannah came back, he hadn’t moved. She must have been gone for seven or eight minutes, she thought, sitting on the closed lid of the downstairs loo while she tried to think, listening to the blood pounding in her ears, but Mark was exactly where she’d left him, hunched over the table, face buried in his hands. She was almost back to her position by the counter before he raised his head to look at her. On his face there was no expectation or request for forgiveness, just uncertainty, the frank acknowledgement that he had no idea how things would play out between them. It startled her that Mark could look so tentative and she felt a rush of tenderness towards him that she quickly fought down. He must have seen it because he reached for her hand. ‘Han . . .’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t.’ She moved back behind the counter, putting it between them. ‘What I want to know now,’ she said, ‘is where my savings fit into this.’

He closed his eyes and his shoulders seemed to drop another inch. Proud, confident Mark withering in front of her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry. If I—’

‘Don’t,’ she said again, putting her hand up. Until she had answers, an explanation that made total sense, she wanted nothing but the facts. ‘Just tell me why.’

‘I owe Nick money.’

‘What?’ Her eyes widened. ‘
You
owe
him
money?’

‘A lot of money.’

That chill on the back of her neck again, as if someone had opened a window and let in the November wind. ‘How much?’

‘I—’

‘Mark – how much?’ Her voice rose and they both heard the alarm in it. ‘How much?’

He looked down at his hands. ‘Just under two million. One point eight.’

The floor seemed to tilt and she gripped the edge of the counter as if to stop herself falling, sliding off the comfortless slate tiles and into the vacuum suddenly yawning at her feet. ‘How,’ she said, ‘is that possible?’

‘He owns part of DataPro.’

She stared at him.

‘I know,’ he said, wildly. ‘Do you think I don’t know? I had no choice.’

‘What . . . Mark, it’s your company. Oh, my God.’
One point eight million
. ‘How? How did it happen? How could you
let
it happen?’

‘I got into a mess.’

She felt her heart give a single heavy thump. ‘What kind of mess?’

‘In 2009, the financial crisis . . . I’d borrowed money from the bank to finance the US office but I’d over-extended, couldn’t make the repayments. We’d been doing business – quite good business – but no one was paying us. Accounts were chasing and chasing but months passed and no one paid – our cash flow was buggered. I missed some payments on the loan and the bank threatened to sue for the whole lot and I panicked. It would have hurt us so badly: I’d already had to let some programmers go, and without a full team we were struggling to get other projects finished on schedule, and—’

‘And Nick?’ She cut him off.

‘He loaned me the money. Quarter of a million. I’d already remortgaged the house, pumped all my own money in. I was—’

‘How did he
have
quarter of a million?’

‘It was his half of our parents’ estate. Mine was long gone, into the hungry maw. I went to see him in prison and I begged him, debased myself in front of him, basically, and he said he’d
think about it
. He kept me waiting for ten days – I nearly went off my nut. Then I got a call saying that he’d see me again – like he was the bloody Pope granting me an audience. I went up there and he said that he’d lend me the money for as long as he was in jail on condition I gave it back to him the day he got out.’

‘But if he only loaned you quarter of a million, how . . .?’

‘That was his other condition: he didn’t want interest. I offered him eight per cent but he wouldn’t take it. He wanted stock in the company or nothing. God, he loved it, Hannah, having me over a barrel – he loved the power, sitting there in his prison clothes in that stinking visiting room with all the other crims, the table covered with cigarette burns, wielding power over
me
. DataPro was
my
thing,
mine
– I’d worked so hard and there was he, dictating terms, demanding stock in it.’

‘And there was really nowhere else you could go?’

‘No. No bank would lend me money at that point: everyone was running scared – you remember what it was like – and our cash flow was . . . I thought I wasn’t going to be able to pay the wages.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘I should have gone to a loan shark. Well, I suppose I did, in a way.’

‘I still don’t understand how you owe him so much.’

‘Because we’re doing well again. David’s investment made a massive difference. We’re debt-free, we’ve got business coming in and clients are paying. We had valuations done last week by two different auditors and they’ve both told us fifteen million. Twelve percent of fifteen mill . . . You’ve got to hand it to him, it was a great investment.’

‘But if you’re doing so well, why take my money?’

‘Because I can’t have Nick anywhere near the buy-out. I’ve got to get his name off the paperwork. The guy who owns Systema is a devout Christian, he makes huge donations to religious charities – if he hears what Nick did and finds out he’s a shareholder, he won’t touch us.’

‘So why not just pay Nick off now?’

‘We don’t have the money, not in cash or assets that we can liquidate easily. And even if we did, we couldn’t take out that kind of amount without raising eyebrows – Systema are going to be trawling the paperwork with a fine-toothed comb.’ Hannah watched anger flare on Mark’s face. ‘I’m not going to let Nick screw this up for me,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to allow it. Everything I’ve ever done or tried to do, he’s been there mocking or stealing my thunder, undermining me, fucking things up. But this is the end. I’ll sell DataPro, I’ll give him his money, then I never want to hear his name again.’