Before We Met: A Novel (41 page)

Her phone: it was in her bag. She ran back across the drive and climbed into the van’s front seat. At first she thought the bag was gone but then she saw that it had fallen forward into the footwell. She snatched it up and scrabbled through it, cursing the clutter of old receipts and tissues.
Come on, come on.
Glancing through the windscreen she saw the front of the house, the door gaping blackly open. What was happening? Who was winning?

At last she found the phone. She pressed the button to unlock it but nothing happened. For a moment, she panicked again – it had run out of battery; it was useless – but then she remembered: Nick had turned it off. Almost laughing with relief, she turned it on and dialled 999, fingers fumbling. Nothing. She tried again: still nothing. Looking at the screen, she saw the signal icon: there was no reception. They were too far out in the country.

With a cry of despair, she threw the phone down on the seat. It bounced and fell into the gap by the handbrake. Almost in tears, she stuck her hand down and groped for it, getting her fingers on it but then feeling it slip farther away.

In the doorway of the house now, a man appeared, visible only in outline. She froze. Which one – Nick or Mark? Who had won?

‘Hannah.’ The shout seemed to fill the whole sky.

Mark.

He stepped free from the shadow of the house and started down the path towards the van. For a moment she was immobilised by fear but then she yanked the passenger door open and got out. Her feet sounded deafening on the gravel.

‘Hannah!’ He came after her and she heard herself give a cry of alarm. ‘Hannah, get back here.’

A wall ran from the side of the house, and in the dim light, she made out a wooden gate partly hidden by overhanging foliage. Shoving it open, she found herself in some kind of formal garden, raised beds divided by paths paved with stone. Mark was ten feet behind her, she could hear him breathing, and without thinking about where she was going, she plunged down the central path.

‘Hannah!’

At the back of the garden there was a long brick wall and what looked like a greenhouse. Next to it was another gate. She headed straight for it, trying to find the quickest route through beds full of fruit canes and the moon faces of leeks gone to seed, but Mark saw where she was going and climbed over one of the beds to cut her off. He snatched at her coat, just missing, and she screamed. ‘Get off me!’

He jumped down right behind her but then he skidded, almost falling over, and she took her chance and ran again. In her terror, she seemed to find a new gear and she reached the gate and managed to slam it before he could get through. Ahead of her now, she saw, twenty or so feet away, was a deep ditch, an old ha-ha, and then fields, just fields, and here and there a stand of trees and then –
thank God, thank God
– she saw a handful of lights, tiny, like jewels, a mile away, maybe more, but lights.

The gate slammed shut again.

Into the ditch and then up the other side, legs burning, Mark thundering down after her, ten feet behind. She tripped, put her hands out to stop herself, felt thistles. Across the first field, her ankles turning over again and again as her feet found rabbit holes and stray briars, a half-buried lump of stone. Overhead, the sky was smothered in cloud and gave hardly any light. Her heart was thumping, her breath coming in great jagged gasps. He would kill her – if he caught her, he’d kill her.
Run
.

The next field was ploughed into furrows a foot high, each one a mini-breaker of solid mud. She started hobbling across it, heading towards the lights, tripping on huge clumps of clay, struggling to keep her balance.

Then, without warning, she caught the tip of her boot. She sprawled, hitting her head on the crest of a furrow, cutting her palms on stones. As soon as she landed, she started to get back up but before she could do it, a hand grabbed the material of her coat. He pulled her up, threw her down on her back and straddled her.

She fought, hitting him, scratching his face, trying to get her knees up behind him like Nick had, but he was too strong. He caught her wrists and forced them down on either side of her head. She wrenched her upper body sideways, turned her head and bit his forearm.

‘You . . .’ He lifted her by her collar and thumped her head backwards against the ground. The pain was stunning; it spread in waves across her skull, and for a moment she lay still. Above her, his face was lost in the darkness; she could only make out his eyes by the shine across them.

‘Nick was right, Hannah,’ he said, breathing hard through his mouth. ‘I do love you.’

‘Oh, God, you’re mad.’ She struggled again, trying to get her hands free, but he just held her down harder, pressing her wrists further into the mud.

‘Stop it. Stop fighting and listen to me.’

‘You’re a murderer – you killed Hermione, Mark. She’s dead. Do you even know what you’ve done? Do you know what that means? You’re a killer.’

‘How can you say that?’ he said, and to her amazement, he sounded hurt – actually wounded. ‘This was for you.’

‘What?’ Her voice was full of horror. ‘No.’

‘It was all for you.’

‘No, Mark. No. This had nothing to do with me.’

‘It had
everything
to do with you. Do you have any idea how hard I’ve been working to try and keep this all under control, to try and save our marriage?’

‘Save our marriage?’ She was incredulous.

‘The stories, the explanations – layer after layer and nothing seemed to satisfy you. You just wouldn’t stop digging – it was like you were trying to destroy us.’ He seemed to choke and she heard blood bubble in his nose. Was he crying?

She tried to move but he pressed his weight down again, pinning her firmly.

‘You’re the first woman I’ve ever loved, Hannah. Do you know what
that
means? Before you, everyone I’d ever met was with me for one of two reasons: as a way of getting to
him
or for my money. But when I met you – I can’t
give
you my money. You don’t want it.’ He laughed, as if the whole thing were delightful. ‘You won’t use my cards, I know you feel weird about the Audi – and I love it. It’s wonderful – you’re with me because you want me.
Me
.’

‘Mark, please – let me go.’

‘No, I need you to listen, Hannah – I’m trying to explain. You’re different. You’re everything I ever wanted – remember I told you that, on our wedding day? I could have had a lot of different women – once you’ve got money, it’s amazing how attractive you are suddenly – but you’re not like that. What I’m trying to say is that you’ve got class. It’s in everything you do – the way you dress, how you look. Your books and music and films. Even your running – I know you hate it but you do it because you’ve got backbone. That’s class.’

‘Mark . . .’

‘Hannah, I love you and I want to be with you for the rest of my life. We can keep a lid on all this, Nick, until the deal’s done – we’ll find a way. I’ll sell the company and then we’ll leave London, go wherever you want. We can forget this ever happened – put it behind us and . . .’

‘What? Mark, you
killed
someone.’

‘Only because I
had
to – to stop you finding out.’ His voice rose in frustration at her refusal to understand. ‘I didn’t
want
to but I had no choice. Nick was going to ruin everything – it was all going to come out, I was terrified of losing you. I had to try to—’

‘Is he dead?’

‘I think so. Yes.’ Mark said it calmly, matter-of-fact. ‘See? He’s gone and you know everything now. We can start again with a clean slate. We’ll go somewhere and make a fresh start. We can make this work; I know we can. Tell me we’re going to be fine.’ He tightened his grip on her wrists. ‘Say it.’

‘I . . .’

‘Say it.’

‘I can’t – I can’t. You’ve killed people – we can never go back.’

He gave a cry of pure anguish. ‘You . . .’ He looked at her for a second, eyes shining in the dark, and then he let go of her wrists and grabbed hold of her coat by the neck. He pulled her towards him and now, at this angle, she could see his eyes, rage-filled and terrible.

He lifted her higher, jerking her upwards, then thrust her back against the ground. Her head hit something hard in the earth – a rock. The burst of excruciating pain was still resonating through her brain as he dragged her head up and smashed it back down again. He was going to kill her, too. She was going to die here, in the pitch dark, in the middle of a vast, empty field miles from anywhere. She thought momentarily of Tom at home in London waiting for her and she thought her heart would burst.

Up again and down. Her vision was starting to chequer – she was going to black out. With her right hand, she scrabbled around, searching. Down went her head again and for a moment, everything turned black. Then her fingers found what they were searching for: a stone the size of her hand, cold, sharp on one side. Through the fear and panic came one clear thought:
This is it
.

She gripped the stone, lifted her arm and then, screwing every ounce of her terror and panic and horror together, she smashed it into his temple. For a second Mark seemed merely stunned. Then he gave a single grunt and slumped on top of her.

Chapter Twenty-seven

The temperature hadn’t risen above freezing for ten days but overhead the sky was a blue better fitted for July than the last week of January. There had been a lot of foot traffic here over the weekend, evidently, and the snow was long gone from the path, but up on the steepest parts of the hill and in the lee of the trees, virgin drifts of it remained. Down to their right, untouched by the farmers, the patchwork fields of Herefordshire were white.

Claiming the need for a head start, Sandy and Lydia had gone on first while Hannah and Tom bought the ticket for the car park. Hannah looked up now and saw them a hundred yards or so up ahead, Lydia willowy in her black jeans and borrowed parka, Sandy six inches shorter and bundled up as if for a polar expedition. The sound of their laughter reached back through the stillness of the air.

Tom put his arm through hers as they negotiated a steep section in the path and came up on to a small plateau that gave a clear view of the grassed-over skeleton of the iron-age fort.

I’d take on a fortful of pagans for you, swede-heart
. Mark’s voice, as clear as if he was standing beside her.

‘All right?’ Tom was looking at her.

‘Yes.’

‘Sure?’

‘Of course.’ She smiled and took a square of the chocolate that he was proffering. He put the rest of the bar into his pocket again and turned to look back the way they’d come. His cheeks were already ruddy from the cold.

‘Is this where he proposed to you? Up here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this meant to be an exorcism?’

‘Of sorts.’

‘Is it working?’

She shook her head. ‘I hear him all the time, wherever I am. I always will, I think.’ She started walking again and Tom caught her up and gave her back his arm. ‘I killed someone,’ she said. ‘The idea of it – another human being is dead because of me.’

‘A human being who killed two other human beings – maybe three – and was about to kill you.’

‘I know. But still.’

They walked on. The Malverns lay ahead of them, the peaks of the line of hills like vertebrae in the spine of an ancient beast that had curled up and fallen asleep underneath the earth. Every night of the two months since it happened Hannah had lain awake and replayed it scene by scene: the confrontation in the kitchen, the chase through the garden out into the pitch-dark fields. The weight of the stone in her hand and the sickening crunch when she’d smashed it against Mark’s temple.

He’d died instantaneously, they’d told her after the autopsy, but she’d known that from the way he’d fallen. Dead weight. It had taken almost all the strength she’d had left to roll him off her, she’d barely had enough energy to stand afterwards, but somehow, slowly, she’d started moving again, stumbling towards the handful of lights, falling many times, her legs weak, her head throbbing with pain. Twice she’d stopped and thrown up, her stomach heaving over and over again though it had been empty except for the half-
inch of whisky Nick had given her. Eventually, six huge fields later –
she still had no idea how much later in real terms – she’d reached the lights and discovered that they belonged to a pub on the fringe of a village. Bloody, covered in mud, she’d staggered inside.

With the help of the landlord and one of the regulars who’d done gardening work there, the police had managed to identify the house. Despite what Mark had said, Nick hadn’t been dead when they found him, but one of his twelve knife wounds had caught an artery and he’d died of blood loss in the back of the ambulance carrying him to hospital in Swindon. She’d cried when they told her, hysterical tears that took ten minutes to bring under control. It had been three weeks before she’d been able to cry a single tear for Mark.

‘The new flat will help.’

‘What?’

‘Having your own place again,’ Tom said. ‘Being freed from our back bedroom.’