Before We Met: A Novel (7 page)

The only thing that surprised her at all was that the drawer on the bottom right was empty. This, she knew, was where he kept the old box-file with his financial paperwork; he’d showed it to her a couple of weeks before they got married, ‘in case I ever get hit by a bus’. Thank God, she’d never had to open it, and she kept her own financial paperwork separately, downstairs in the sitting-room bureau, in the accordion file she’d always used.

She looked round the room but the box-file was nowhere to be seen. He must have taken it out to pay bills or move some of his savings, but where would he have put it? She hadn’t seen it round the house anywhere but that wasn’t surprising: he did all his personal accounting up here at the desk. For a few minutes the voice in her head had been mercifully silent. Now it started whispering again:
Where’s the file? Why would he take it out of this room?

Hannah perched on the chair and rested her head in her hands for a moment, fingers over her ears as if she could block out the voice that way. She was appalled at herself – she was behaving just like her mother in the final weeks before Dad left. Ringing hotels . . . going through desk drawers. It was so sordid, so – grubby. Hannah had promised herself she’d never become that sort of person.

Where’s the file?
asked the voice.

All right, she told it, angry now; all right, I’ll look for it. I’ll look for it, find it, and then the mystery will be over, won’t it? Standing, she took a final look around the room and then went downstairs where she checked their bedroom and the two spare rooms. The box-file wasn’t there and nor was it in the sitting room, either under the coffee table or in the bureau or on any of the shelves. In the kitchen she went as far as checking the drawers and cupboards, but she didn’t find it anywhere.

The clock on the cooker said twenty past one; she should have some lunch now if she was going to be ready to eat supper with Tom later. She wasn’t hungry at all, though. Putting her gloves on again, she went back out to the garden and started yanking up weeds and the long strands of grass that were sprouting in the empty tomato trough and round the base of the shrubs next to the wall. After five minutes, however, she stopped.

Where was Mark? In New York, she told herself; the Rome thing was just Neesha’s mistake. Obviously he’d stayed somewhere other than the W this time or, having missed his flight, he hadn’t been able to get another room there and had checked in elsewhere.

If that was the case, though
, argued the voice in her ear,
shouldn’t he have said which hotel he was at, especially since he’d lost his mobile and the hotel phone was the only way of talking to him?
And why the hell hadn’t she asked him? But then, she reasoned, why would she have? She’d assumed he’d be at the W; she’d had no reason to think otherwise.

She remembered the phone call she’d interrupted, the startled look on his face when she’d opened the study door. And now his missing paperwork. She made herself stand straight, shoulders back, and took several long, slow breaths. The sun had gone behind a cloud and, without it, the air was so cold it seared the inside of her nostrils. She was being ridiculous, as hysterical as her mother at her most outrageous. She loved her husband and she knew he loved her. She trusted him and there was no reason not to.

Nonetheless, with a feeling of inevitability she understood that, having let in the element of doubt, she would now have to find the box-file. Until she could look at his bank statements and be sure that he hadn’t hidden them to conceal evidence of money spent on hotels and dinners and presents for someone else –
trips to Rome
– the nagging, insinuating voice in her head was not going to be quiet.

Chapter Five

DataPro’s offices took up two whole floors of a substantial modern building set back from the river at Hammersmith in the immaculately bland gardens of an upscale business park. He’d started here, Mark had told her, with two rooms: his office and one for his two programmers. Initially he’d leased those on a month-by-month basis but as the business had grown – and grown – the office space had grown with it and he’d added first the suite across the hall, then the one next to it, and the one next to that. The Internet start-up that had moved into the building at the same time and overconfidently signed a ten-year lease on the floor above had gone bust in 2001, and DataPro had taken over their space and now occupied a duplex of more than twelve thousand square feet.

Hannah left her car in Manbre Road and walked round to the entrance to the park. There was no security guard in the booth on Saturdays. She skirted the end of the car-barrier and followed the pavement until she reached the lawn that stretched away from the foot of DataPro’s building to the Thames footpath running directly along the river’s edge. Someone had raked the lawn already today, she saw: though the wind last night had left the silver birch trees almost naked, there was scarcely a stray leaf in sight.

Cold sunlight reflected off the building’s fourteen mirrored glass floors and from the pools of the fountains set either side of the main entrance. Just get it over with, she told herself. Go up there, look, then go home and forget all about it. She took a final galvanising glance at the river then spun in through the revolving doors.

The atrium was a vast marble-floored room from whose distant ceiling hung a sculpture of tangled steel that made her think of space junk, one of those defunct satellites doomed to orbit the earth for ever. The bank of lifts was on the back wall but before them came a line of turnstiles. Without a security pass, there was no way through. Tony, one of the regular doormen, was at the desk, however, his neat grey head bent over the sports pages of the
Mirror
that he’d smoothed out tidily in front of him. She’d met him several times, first when she was visiting from New York and Mark had brought her in to meet DataPro’s staff, and then pretty regularly since she’d moved back. Tony was employed by the building, not DataPro, but Mark had introduced them that first time and the doorman always recognised her.

‘Mrs Reilly?’ He looked up from the paper and smiled at her. There was a chill in the air in the lobby and he was in his cold-weather uniform, a ribbed oiled-wool sweater with the name of the management company embroidered over his heart. ‘This is an unexpected pleasure.’

‘How are you, Tony?’

‘I’m doing all right, thank you, yes, not too bad. Wild weather last night, wasn’t it? I walked through Bishops Park on my way in this morning and there were branches down all over the place.’

Hannah made a face. ‘Yes, I’ve just been tidying up at home.’

‘Well, we’re under control here. The gardeners have been this morning, got the grounds looking spick and span again.’ He looked at her as if she should be relieved, as if untidiness outside might pose some sort of threat to Mark’s business.

‘That’s good. Tony, I wondered, could I zip upstairs for a couple of minutes? Mark’s away for the weekend but we’ve got a meeting with the bank manager first thing on Monday and Mark’s just told me he’s left all the paperwork in his office. Would you mind?’

‘Well, it’s totally against the rules,’ he said. ‘Without a pass, no one’s allowed past the—’

‘I can imagine, and I’m sorry to have to ask – it’s just . . .’

‘Oh, I’m only pulling your leg.’ He gave her a little wink. ‘Of course you can go up. Mr Harris is around but he’s just popped out to get a bite of lunch. I’ll let him know you’re here if he gets back before you go.’ Tony stood up from behind the desk and walked over to the smoked-glass security gate, which he opened with a card attached to the extending lead on his belt. ‘There you go.’

The lift carried Hannah soundlessly to the seventh floor where she stepped out into the lobby. The receptionist’s desk was unmanned, of course, and there were no lights on in the row of offices behind the plate-glass wall in front of her. Upstairs, no doubt, at least some of the programmers would be in. Mark paid big bonuses for projects completed early, which meant that they worked round the clock, weeks and weekends. Their floor was a lot more relaxed-looking than this one. It wasn’t Silicon Valley but there was a large room with sofas and beanbags, table football and snooker, and a cupboard full of caffeinated, sugar-heavy drinks and lethal snacks. A lot of the programmers were in their twenties and there was a definite university computer-club atmosphere up there.

By contrast, this level was corporate, the face of DataPro that visiting clients saw. Here everything was light. The desks were large and clutter-free, with computers that were replaced every year, and those walls that weren’t glass were painted fresh cream. The carpets were sand-coloured, and the entire floor was dotted with lush bamboos and a type of glossy deep-green succulent she’d never seen anywhere else. The place had a beach-like, almost tropical feel.

Mark’s office was at the end of the corridor. It was the same one he’d always had, he’d told her, one of the original two rooms. When she’d asked, surprised, if he hadn’t been tempted by the much larger corner office with its full-on view of the river, he’d said that this one had sentimental value, and it was big and smart enough to use for client meetings if he didn’t want to use the conference room.

Hannah pushed open the heavy glass door and went in. The outside wall was glass, too, and offered a view over the rooftops of Hammersmith. Directly below was the entrance to the building and then a good sweep of the lawn, but if you stood almost in the corner and looked to your left, you could see the river. If she’d had the chance to bag the corner office she would have jumped at it, she thought. The river wasn’t especially beautiful here; the opposite bank was scrubby, especially now in November when the old year’s growth was dying, and this far west there was none of the architectural glory of the centre of London. In fact, the only real man-made feature of any note was the old Harrods furniture repository which stood on the opposite bank. Nonetheless, this was the Thames, pewter-coloured today in the late-autumn sun, rolling steadily onwards as it had done for centuries, powerful and inscrutable.

She turned to Mark’s large blond-wood desk. She had to be quick – the last thing she wanted was to meet David and have to lie about what she was doing here. And if he saw her, he would mention it to Mark for sure. How long would he take to get his lunch? Apart from the business park itself and Charing Cross Hospital on Fulham Palace Road, this part of Hammersmith was largely residential, and from here it was a ten-minute walk to even an uninspiring corner shop. Tony hadn’t said how long ago David had gone out, though.

Her eyes rested for a few seconds on the framed photograph that Mark kept on his desktop, just to the right of his computer. Neither of them had wanted an official photographer – in the context of the rest of their wedding, it would have seemed too fussy and formal – but Ant had insisted they’d want some pictures and had taken on the role himself. Hannah picked up the photo and looked at it. There they were on the steps of Chelsea Town Hall, Mark in his gorgeous navy suit, grinning and squinting into the sharp April sun, one hand curled firmly round the waist of her oyster silk shift dress. She had a hand up too, shielding her eyes from the storm of confetti that Pippa and Roisin had just unleashed over their heads. Mark’s smile – being the focus of it was like standing in front of a large plate-glass window and feeling the sun stream through, light and warmth together.

Just after the picture had been taken he’d turned to kiss her, confetti still scattered on the shoulders of his jacket. ‘Look at you,’ he said. ‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted.’

About a hundred times that day, during the wildly extravagant lunch at Claridge’s, the champagne afterwards and the cab ride out to Heathrow for the flight to Capri, she’d looked at him and thought,
My husband
, and had hardly been able to believe it. Now, just eight months later, here she was sneaking about in his office on a Saturday afternoon. She felt a wash of intense revulsion at herself. Come on then, she thought; just look for the file and go.

The drawers opened effortlessly, as if cushioned by air. She went through them one by one, not letting herself be distracted by anything else, just looking for the grey marbled cardboard of the box-file. By the time she reached the last two, she’d convinced herself it wasn’t going to be there, but as she opened the lowest of the three drawers on the right-hand side, the spot corresponding to the one the file occupied in his desk at home, she saw it. She lifted it out on to the desktop and pressed the round plastic button at the side to release the lid.

Inside was a pile of paperwork an inch or so thick, a statement from Mark’s Coutts current account on the top. She scanned quickly down the list of recent transactions but there was nothing that caught her eye, no large amounts of money going out to Tiffany, the Waldorf-Astoria, or even – as far as she could tell – some high-end florist. She sprang the clip that held the papers in place and took the statement out but, as she was turning to the second page, she saw what was next in the file, a letter from the building society, and her eyes homed in on a number.
£130,000.
She picked the letter up and read the full sentence. ‘
Following our recent meeting, I am pleased to be able to confirm an extension to your mortgage of £130,000, as requested
.’ She skimmed the rest and then turned to the sheet attached, a revised schedule of payments. Almost without thinking, she put out her hand, pulled up Mark’s chair and sat down.