Before We Met: A Novel (39 page)

‘He didn’t tell me.’ Hannah felt a surge of relief. ‘I read about it online, in the old newspaper reports. You were tried and found guilty.’

He nodded. ‘I was. But the jury can only base a verdict on the evidence they’ve heard.’

‘Oh, come on,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Don’t even try—’

‘The key to a successful lie is to stay as close to the actual facts as possible. It’s the first rule of deception, isn’t it?’

‘You tell me.’

He ignored her. ‘So, a lot of it was true. I’d reached the end of my rope with Mark and I wanted to piss him off, so one night when his girlfriend was wasted, I chatted her up and took her home.’ He took a pull on the cigarette, watching the end as it glowed red then faded again. ‘I’ll never forgive myself for what happened to Patty – I dream about her all the time. She didn’t deserve that, no one would, and what I did was . . .’ He shook his head. ‘It got totally out of hand. We were both so messed up; we’d drunk so much and done so many lines, and . . .’

‘You injected her when she was almost unconscious.’

His eyes went hard. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I haven’t had enough time over the past ten years to reflect on it? I’m telling you, I live with what I did every single day.’ He took a long drag on the cigarette and a soft column of ash fell on the table-top. ‘Mark,’ he said. ‘I pissed him off and he came back and fucked me up. Ten years of my life.’

‘What about her life?’ Hannah said. ‘You let her die. You filled her with drugs, and then, when it all went wrong, you just let her die. He had nothing to do with that. He—’

‘Just shut up for a minute and listen, will you?’ The cigarette was down to the filter and Nick ground it out in the saucer, burning his fingertips. ‘The club, my taking her home, that was Friday night – Saturday morning. On Sunday afternoon, Mark showed up at my flat. I wasn’t going to let him in – he was raging, shouting and banging on the door, and I still had her there. And I was off my face, we both were – we’d been wasted for two days by that point. Mark shoved past me and came barging in. He made so much noise that Patty came to the sitting room to see what the hell was going on. She was in the doorway, naked, hardly able to stand,’ Nick looked down, avoiding Hannah’s eye. ‘Mark grabbed her and threw her face forward across the sofa. He asked her how she liked it, having sex with both brothers.’

Hannah was seized by a sudden dread. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, just stop now.’

He shook his head. ‘You need to know.’

She closed her eyes, as if that would prevent her from hearing.

‘I tried to pull him off her.’

‘I don’t believe you – I don’t believe any of it. This is bullshit.’

‘I tried to pull him off,’ said Nick, talking over her, ‘but he was sober and I was wrecked and I didn’t stand a chance. He shoved me and I hit my head on the corner of the coffee table. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came round, he was standing over her with his trousers undone and she was face down in front of him making this wheezing noise. Her face had gone white and all blue round the mouth, and she was sweating. I said we should call an ambulance – I thought she was having a heart attack. I was crawling round the room on my hands and knees, blood running into my eye, trying to find my phone, but Mark stopped me. He said I’d go to prison for supplying and we could help her ourselves – do mouth-to-mouth, chest compressions.’

‘Except you didn’t.’

‘I did. I tried and tried and tried but it didn’t work. Jesus, when it dawned on me that she was dead . . .’

There was silence for several seconds. Hannah stared at her hands. There was a rushing in her ears, blood thumping through them far too fast, and the room eddied round her like a tide. He’d raped her – Mark had raped Patty. Her husband, the man she was married to, shared a bed with, slept with. ‘And then what happened?’ she said quietly.

‘I said we had to call the police and he said yes but to wait a moment. He said we had to think strategically.’

‘Strategically?’

‘That was his word. Basically, he said, there was no way that we were going to get out of this unscathed and so we had to make the best we could of it.’

Hannah felt the contents of her stomach rise up her throat. He’d raped a woman, she’d died, and then Mark had thought about
strategy
.

‘If we called the police straight away, he said, both of us would be charged – we were both there, DNA from both of us would be on her body. But things looked much worse for me. She was his girlfriend – there was a reason why his DNA would be on her, and people had seen them together at the club on Friday – it wasn’t a secret they’d nipped off for a quickie. And, as he pointed out, it was my flat she’d died in.’

Nick ran his hands over his shaven head and she heard the stubble rasp. ‘Mark said that if we both went to prison, we’d lose everything. DataPro would be finished, and when we got out, we’d be unemployable – no one else would give us jobs. But,’ Nick looked at her, ‘if one of us took the rap, the other could keep DataPro going and then, when the whole thing was over, it would still be there.’

‘I don’t . . .’

‘He said that because DataPro was his, it made sense for him to be the one who ran it. Patty’s death was an accident, it was the drugs and booze that killed her, he said, not anything that either of us had done to her, so the police couldn’t charge me with anything that would carry a long sentence.’

‘And you just swallowed all this?’

‘I didn’t
just swallow
it,’ Nick said angrily. ‘I’m stupid but I’m not that bloody stupid. I made a calculation. Either way, I knew I was going to be in deep shit. I mean, if you’ve read about it, you know all the gory details – I wasn’t going to get off scot-free whatever happened. I gave her the drugs; she was in my house; there were . . . marks on her: I was going to jail. Mark told me that if I kept quiet about him ever being at my place that afternoon, he would pay me a dividend from DataPro when I got out.’

‘How much?’ she said, though she already knew.

‘Two million.’

Hannah closed her eyes for a moment. ‘You don’t own any shares at all, do you?’ she said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He told me that you owned twelve per cent of the company; that you invested your share of your parents’ estate – quarter of a million.’

‘Estate? Our parents aren’t dead.’

‘I know that now,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t until today. Mark told me that you’d invested your inheritance and the two million was to buy you out.’

Nick expelled a short burst of air. ‘I wish.’ He opened the pack of cigarettes again and took out another. He lit it and took a deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs. ‘What would you have done, in my shoes?’ he said. ‘I was going to jail anyway, and if I did it this way, there’d be money waiting when I got out, enough to keep me going for the rest of my life even if no one gave me a job ever again. I told myself that serving the sentence would be my job: I’d put the time in and then I’d get paid. It made sense.’

‘It would if you thought you were only going down for a couple of years,’ she said.

He tipped his head. ‘I didn’t think they’d charge me with manslaughter.’

‘Why didn’t you say something, when they did?’

‘I never thought I’d get ten years. My lawyer said it would be three or four – Patty was a grown-up, she’d known what she was doing. With time off for good behaviour, and parole . . . So I went along with it. Only to be shafted by Mark yet again.’

‘You mean . . .’

‘He’s not paying me.’ Nick stared at her. ‘Whatever reason he gave you for coming to Wakefield, he lied. He came to tell me I could have two hundred and fifty thousand – an eighth of what we’d agreed – take it or leave it.’

Her savings and his own and the new mortgage.

‘And if you left it?’

‘If I didn’t accept the “new terms”, as he called them, he said he’d make sure I was back in prison before my feet touched the ground. All my life,’ Nick said, ‘he’s been trying to take what’s mine. However much he’s got, it’s not enough – he’s not happy unless I’ve got nothing. The day he came to visit me – the second time – he even walked off with my bloody cigarettes.’

Hannah went cold again. ‘Did he tell you how he was going to have you put back in prison?’

‘He mentioned Hermione – I think it was the only thing he could think of. In court she said some stuff about our sex life that was a bit . . .’

‘You hadn’t been in touch with her? You didn’t threaten her?’

‘What?’

‘Nick, Hermione’s dead.’

He stared at her and the cigarette dropped from between his fingers. If there’d been any doubt left in Hannah’s mind, one look at him now would have put paid to it.

‘Dead?’ he said, and his voice had gone faint. ‘Are you . . . ? You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?’

‘She was attacked near the hospital, on her way home – battered to death. She died of head injuries.’

‘When?’

‘Thursday afternoon – late afternoon. Nick, they found a pack of cigarettes with your fingerprints on at the scene.’

He made a terrible sound in his throat as if he were bringing up some deep, integral part of himself, but Hannah barely registered it. Mark had killed Hermione –
Mark
. He’d planned it – set out to do it in cold blood. Her mind went scrambling back over everything he’d told her, everything that had happened. She remembered that evening – she’d seen Nick outside the delicatessen and Mark had come tearing back across London to find her. Where had he been? He’d left that message on Hermione’s phone at quarter to nine; he’d stood in their sitting room and left a message for a woman he knew was dead – he’d made a
joke
: ‘
Hannah . . . my wife – I think you’ve met
.’ Now she remembered his weird, nervous energy, his white knuckles on the poker as he’d jabbed at the fire. Oh, God – he’d kissed her; he’d pushed her against the wall and tried to have sex with her. And the next day, when the police had come, the way he’d trembled . . . She’d taken it for shock, grief, but he must have thought they’d come for him. Hannah retched and retched again. He’d killed a woman – not just a woman: a friend. He’d come home from beating a woman to death and tried to have sex with her.

Nick reached across the table and took hold of her hand. He held it tightly and she looked at their fingers, hers pale, his stained at the tips with nicotine. ‘He told me you’d threatened him, too,’ she said. ‘He said you were violent.’

‘Judging by the way you ran the other night, it worked.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He didn’t want you to talk to me, did he? So he scared the living daylights out of you, made sure you’d run a mile the moment you saw me.’

Hannah remembered how urgently Mark had bundled her into the cab outside the pub that night, how he’d made her promise to stay inside the hotel, how he’d gripped her hand when they’d walked to dinner at Mao Tai. The conversation that night – he’d told her Nick had been threatening Hermione, that that was why she’d looked so terrified in the corridor at the hospital, but it was
him
she’d been scared of. He was the killer.

She closed her eyes again as if she could shut it out, unsee it. She’d loved him, she’d trusted him, and all the time, he’d been working away at a filigree of lies so carefully made it took her breath away.

For a long time they sat in silence. Nick smoked one cigarette after another, slowly filling the saucer with butts, but he didn’t touch the whisky again. Every few seconds, his eyes went to the cheap red mobile, and after a while he began picking it up, pressing buttons to light up the screen, checking, then checking again.

Hannah watched their silhouettes in the glass of the window behind him, the back of his head, her own white face. The cuts around her wrists throbbed and she was grateful: the pain was something to focus on, an anchor in reality. Otherwise, she was floating. She examined her feelings with a sort of detachment. She should have been afraid, she should have been wild with panic, but instead she felt a strange sense of calm. Perhaps it was a protective thing, she thought. Perhaps this was too much for a person to take in at once and her mind had gone into some sort of fugue state. Perhaps, when this was over, she’d have no mental record of any of it.

In an odd way, too, she felt better – clean. For days and days she’d been sifting through his lies, feeling dirtier and dirtier as she dug down through the layers. Now, finally, she could hold it in her hand and lift it up into the light: the hard kernel of truth he had worked so hard to hide.

‘All this because you hate each other,’ she said, breaking the silence.

‘No,’ said Nick, looking up from the phone. ‘Because Mark hates me. He’s hated me from the day I was born.’ He picked the bit of silver cigarette paper from the table and turned it between his fingers. ‘He hated me because my mother loved me. That was my crime back then, when we were babies: I loved my mother and she loved me. Mark couldn’t stand it.’

‘When did you realise? How old were you?’

‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘It was a fact of my life, there from the beginning, like having parents and getting bigger and knowing you’d go to school one day. My brother hating me, constantly looking for ways to hurt me.’