At the door Mr Reilly gave Hannah a hard look. ‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he said. ‘Why did you come here?’
She looked him in the eye as a volley of hail hit the patterned glass behind her. She couldn’t tell him the truth: it would devastate Mrs Reilly to know what Mark had said. ‘Because I was curious,’ she said. ‘You’re my husband’s parents and I’d never met you.’
He stared back but the answer seemed to have enough of the truth in it to satisfy him. ‘He told you we were . . . estranged?’
‘Estranged. Yes.’
‘And the timing? I don’t believe this has nothing to do with what’s just happened. You’ve been married and living in London for months and we’ve never heard of you, and now Nick’s out of prison, suddenly you’re on our doorstep.’
‘Okay,’ Hannah said evenly. ‘Yes, I’ll admit that there’s a connection. I wanted to know about Nick.’ She made herself hold eye contact. ‘Mark doesn’t talk about his brother, won’t – I found out about Patty Hendrick purely by chance. And now another woman’s dead and the police are on our doorstep and I don’t know anything about him.’
‘He’s a killer,’ Mr Reilly told Hannah, and next to him, Elizabeth flinched. ‘What more do you need to know? He’s a killer and we’re a killer’s parents.’
Hannah slammed the car door, put her seatbelt on and programmed the GPS to ‘Home’. Then she stopped. Where was she actually going to go tonight?
She rested her forehead on the top of the steering wheel. With a sudden burst of longing she thought about her life in New York – her friends, her apartment, her job – she hadn’t realised it at the time, of course, but everything had been so simple then. She saw her office with its huge glass desk and haphazard piles of papers and books and magazines; the view of the Empire State Building from the corridor just outside. Her assistant, Flynn, with his so-ugly-it’s-got-to-be-cool wardrobe and lengthy oral reviews of whatever pop-up restaurant had opened in Greenpoint over the weekend. She’d moaned to Roisin sometimes about the weeks that passed in a blur of work but, right now, she’d give anything to be back there, strung out on coffee, pulling an all-nighter; to wake up in the apartment on Waverly and find that this whole situation – Even Mark? said the voice. Your marriage? – was just a Bobby Ewing-style alternative storyline, a nightmare.
The wind threw another stinging rash of hail against the windscreen and Hannah had a new thought. Slowly she raised her head from the wheel. If their parents weren’t dead, then where the hell had Nick got a quarter of a million pounds? Mark had said it was his share of their parents’ estate, money from the sale of the house, but it couldn’t have been, could it? Their house was right here – they were in it.
She tried to think. Nick hadn’t earned that money himself, that was for sure, not by legitimate means, anyway: the newspapers had backed Mark up on that point, talking about his inability to hold down a job and how he’d taken hand-outs from his mother to pay the rent on his flat in Borough. Unless Mark had paid him a huge bonus at some point – and that seemed very unlikely – the only way Nick could have had that sort of money was if he’d been into something illegal. Hannah felt a wave of pure exhaustion: at this point, she thought, she wouldn’t be surprised if she found out there was no money involved at all.
‘Oh, it wasn’t Nick who didn’t get on with Jim’ – she heard Mrs Reilly’s bright tone and deliberately blotted it from her mind. No, not yet; she wasn’t ready.
Getting out her phone, she sent Tom a text: Can I stay with you tonight? In the car now but will explain when I see you. Really need to talk.
She put the phone on the passenger seat where she could see it and turned on the engine. The car had grown cold while she’d been inside and her breath had fogged up the glass. The chamois-leather sponge she kept for the purpose had rolled into the footwell on the other side and she undid her seatbelt and reached for it. She was straining, her hand almost on it, when there was a sharp rap behind her. Jerking upright, she saw Elizabeth Reilly’s desperate face pressed against the glass. Hannah’s nerves were so jangled, she shrieked in alarm.
She rolled down the window. Mark’s mother had left the house in a hurry, it seemed: she hadn’t put her coat on but was holding it over her head like a shield. She pulled it forward now to protect her eyes from the hail bouncing off the car roof.
‘I know you need to go,’ she said, voice nearly drowned out by the radio-static noise of it, ‘but I had to try . . . I shouldn’t ask you, put you in a difficult position like this, but . . . can you help us? Me – it’s just me. Gordon doesn’t want to see him, he’s too angry, but I . . . I miss my son.’ She started to cry.