Before We Met(108)
The roar of planes coming in to land at Heathrow was the last thing Hannah was sure about. After that, there was just the sound of the engine and the other traffic around them on the motorway, with an occasional rough bronchitic cough from the front. Every few minutes there was the click of a lighter and the air filled with acrid cigarette smoke. Had they stayed on the M4 or had Nick taken the London Orbital and then one of the numerous other motorways that came off it like spokes? There was no way of knowing: they could be heading anywhere. Without markers, time started to billow in and out: had it been ten minutes since she’d heard the planes or twenty? The rain came in waves, too, sometimes drumming so hard on the windscreen that he was forced to slow down, sometimes dying away almost completely.
She took an inventory of her pain. Her head was bad – the temple she’d hit was throbbing, sending needles of pain down through her eye – but her shoulder was injured, too. Something, either muscles or a ligament, was seriously torn.
She couldn’t stop thinking about her mother now. If something happened – if he kills you, said the voice – she’d never have a chance to say sorry. It was Mrs Reilly who’d done it, the reverence with which she’d handled that cheap photograph album, her desperate face at the car window. Despite everything, ten years of being ignored – scorned, her husband had said – she’d been prepared to beg a stranger for the smallest chance of seeing her son again.
Despite the way Hannah had behaved towards her, the brusque behaviour and constant rejection, her mother loved her, wanted to talk to her, counted down the weeks and months between Hannah’s infrequent visits. Hannah remembered how she’d stood in the kitchen in Malvern as a teenager quoting The Second Sex – hardly her own intellectual discovery: they’d studied it for French A-level – and denouncing her mother’s choices in life and she was ashamed of herself. Yes, her mother had never had a career, had never wanted one beyond bringing up her children, but couldn’t she, Hannah, one of the recipients of that love and attention and sacrifice, respect that? Be grateful? Despite all the hurt she’d inflicted, she realised, she could always rely on her mother’s unfailing loyalty and love. She thought of the trepidation she heard in Sandy’s voice when she telephoned, her obvious fear that she’d called at the wrong time, and Hannah wanted to cry with shame. If she came through this alive, she thought, she’d go to Malvern and throw herself at her mother’s feet, tell her she loved and appreciated her and was sorry.
There was the click of the indicator and they pulled out again. He was driving quickly but not quickly enough, she realised with despair, to draw the attention of the police. She could sense him, his physical presence seemed to weigh down the air, but he hadn’t uttered a word to her since he’d slammed the back doors shut. The silence was worse than anything he might have said. Years ago on the news, she’d seen Stephanie Slater, the woman Michael Sams had kidnapped and kept tied up for days in a wheelie bin. She’d told the interviewer that she’d talked to him, never let him forget that she was a real person, trying to make it harder for him to kill her. But this wasn’t about sex, was it, and she wasn’t some poor woman pulled off the street at random.
Hannah tried to think logically. Why would Nick kill her? He’d had a reason for killing Hermione but she, Hannah, had done nothing to him. What would he hope to achieve? Then she had another thought. What if he’d finally spoken to Mark and he knew he didn’t have the money? Was that it? Was this some kind of revenge attack? Or was she going to be used as a bargaining chip? Bait?
They’d been driving for a long time, maybe an hour and a half, maybe two hours, when she heard the indicator again and they began to slow down. They climbed a short slope and the burr of motorway traffic receded. A brief pause, then a green glow on the ceiling and they were moving again but more slowly, fifty miles an hour now, not eighty. She strained, listening for any clue at all as to where they were, but apart from another vehicle every minute or so and the sound of wind in the trees, there was nothing. The road had changed, too, winding one way then the other, dipping then rising. There was no glow of streetlights across the ceiling, no more traffic lights. They were out in the country.
After another ten or fifteen minutes, they slowed almost to a stop and turned off the road on to what felt like an unmade track. The van lurched in and out of potholes, jarring Hannah’s hip and shoulder against the floor. Wherever he was taking her, they must be almost there.