‘What is it?’
‘Well, that’s it,’ said Mrs Reilly. ‘When I found it hidden like that, I thought it must be something important or . . . embarrassing.’ She cast a quick glance in the direction of one of the well-endowed ladies on the wall. ‘But it’s not. It’s just pictures, pages torn out of magazines and the like.’ She opened the box and lifted a slim bundle of papers out on to the desk. ‘Look.’ She slid it across.
On top, Hannah saw, its paper brittle now more than twenty years later, was an advert for aftershave, one of the exclusive small-batch types only for sale at Harrods or Harvey Nicks. The black-and-white picture showed a woman in a white silk dress standing barefoot on the deck of a beautiful wooden yacht. The same breeze that wrinkled the water lifted her long hair away from the smooth length of her back. A square-jawed man was emerging from the cabin with a couple of drinks and a knowing smile. The mood was romantic, cheesy, and utterly aspirational. Wear this aftershave, the picture said, and this life will be yours: the gorgeous, aloof woman; the antique yacht; sundowners on the Riviera.
Turning over, Hannah found a piece that she guessed had been torn from an interiors magazine showing an amazing glass house – laughably referred to as a summer cabin – on a island off the coast of Norway. Next was a yellowing Sunday Times review of a restaurant in Bruges with pictures of a spectacular dining room, and then an interview with the family who ran La Colombe d’Or hotel in St-Paul-de-Vence – with a jolt, Hannah remembered Mark talking about it only a month or so ago, saying he’d always wanted to go. There were pictures of a London townhouse not dissimilar to the one in Quarrendon Street – the kitchen in particular was very like theirs, with a slate floor and long farmhouse table – and a huge apartment in the Dakota Building with views of Central Park. Near the bottom of the pile was a run of pages with pictures of an old Jaguar XJS, and then, the final sheet, a Knight Frank advertisement, like the ones she saw in back issues of Country Life at the dentist, for an eight-bedroomed Tudor house in Gloucestershire, complete with walled gardens and a tennis court.
‘Expensive tastes even as a teenager,’ said Mrs Reilly at her shoulder. ‘It’s lucky he turned out to be so successful, isn’t it?’
Hannah had a sudden memory of the first night on the beach at Montauk with Mark, their conversation about living in New York. ‘I used to sit in my bedroom at home,’ he’d said, ‘devising ways I could make it happen.’ There was nothing lucky about it, she thought; he’d made sure he was successful. The boring, ordinary, petit bourgeois people he had to leave behind.
Mrs Reilly was looking at her. To hide her face, Hannah went to the window. Like the area at the front of the house, the garden was mostly lawn, a narrow stretch of twenty-five or thirty metres extending to a flimsy panelled fence, interrupted only by a cheap wooden bird-table. The hail hammered down on a skirt of crazy paving around the house. Just beyond the fence that divided their garden from their neighbour’s, she could see the pitched roof of a small garden shed.
‘It must have been very hard for you,’ she said, trying to sound non-committal.
‘The trial?’ said Mrs Reilly.
‘Yes, but even before that. Mark’s told me what Nick was like as a teenager, how wild he was.’
‘He was a handful,’ she agreed, nodding.
‘It sounds like it was a little more than that.’
Mrs Reilly frowned. ‘He was badly behaved when it came to girls, yes, I have to admit, and beyond a certain age, it was a struggle to get him to go to school, but otherwise . . .’
Hannah looked at the shed. ‘What about Jim Thomas?’ she said. ‘Your old neighbour.’
‘Oh, it wasn’t Nick who didn’t get on with Jim,’ said Mrs Reilly brightly. ‘That was Mark.’
Hannah felt the cold sensation on the back of her neck. ‘But the fire in his shed on the allotment?’ she said. ‘And what happened to his dog.’
‘The fire was an accident.’ Mrs Reilly picked up the pile of papers and dropped them smartly back into the box-file. ‘They’d been smoking in there to annoy Jim – that was bad of them, I know – and they hadn’t put a cigarette out properly. We paid to replace the shed – Jim ended up better off, I should think. The old one was quite shabby and . . .’
‘His dog?’ Hannah pressed.
Mrs Reilly’s face tightened. ‘That whole thing was . . . a misunderstanding. They just found Molly. They didn’t have anything to do with her drowning.’