Before We Met: A Novel (33 page)

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
.

Chapter Twenty-three

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.