‘You injected her when she was almost unconscious.’
His eyes went hard. ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Do you think I haven’t had enough time over the past ten years to reflect on it? I’m telling you, I live with what I did every single day.’ He took a long drag on the cigarette and a soft column of ash fell on the table-top. ‘Mark,’ he said. ‘I pissed him off and he came back and fucked me up. Ten years of my life.’
‘What about her life?’ Hannah said. ‘You let her die. You filled her with drugs, and then, when it all went wrong, you just let her die. He had nothing to do with that. He—’
‘Just shut up for a minute and listen, will you?’ The cigarette was down to the filter and Nick ground it out in the saucer, burning his fingertips. ‘The club, my taking her home, that was Friday night – Saturday morning. On Sunday afternoon, Mark showed up at my flat. I wasn’t going to let him in – he was raging, shouting and banging on the door, and I still had her there. And I was off my face, we both were – we’d been wasted for two days by that point. Mark shoved past me and came barging in. He made so much noise that Patty came to the sitting room to see what the hell was going on. She was in the doorway, naked, hardly able to stand,’ Nick looked down, avoiding Hannah’s eye. ‘Mark grabbed her and threw her face forward across the sofa. He asked her how she liked it, having sex with both brothers.’
Hannah was seized by a sudden dread. ‘Stop,’ she said. ‘Please, just stop now.’
He shook his head. ‘You need to know.’
She closed her eyes, as if that would prevent her from hearing.
‘I tried to pull him off her.’
‘I don’t believe you – I don’t believe any of it. This is bullshit.’
‘I tried to pull him off,’ said Nick, talking over her, ‘but he was sober and I was wrecked and I didn’t stand a chance. He shoved me and I hit my head on the corner of the coffee table. I don’t know how long I was out, but when I came round, he was standing over her with his trousers undone and she was face down in front of him making this wheezing noise. Her face had gone white and all blue round the mouth, and she was sweating. I said we should call an ambulance – I thought she was having a heart attack. I was crawling round the room on my hands and knees, blood running into my eye, trying to find my phone, but Mark stopped me. He said I’d go to prison for supplying and we could help her ourselves – do mouth-to-mouth, chest compressions.’
‘Except you didn’t.’
‘I did. I tried and tried and tried but it didn’t work. Jesus, when it dawned on me that she was dead . . .’
There was silence for several seconds. Hannah stared at her hands. There was a rushing in her ears, blood thumping through them far too fast, and the room eddied round her like a tide. He’d raped her – Mark had raped Patty. Her husband, the man she was married to, shared a bed with, slept with. ‘And then what happened?’ she said quietly.
‘I said we had to call the police and he said yes but to wait a moment. He said we had to think strategically.’
‘Strategically?’
‘That was his word. Basically, he said, there was no way that we were going to get out of this unscathed and so we had to make the best we could of it.’
Hannah felt the contents of her stomach rise up her throat. He’d raped a woman, she’d died, and then Mark had thought about strategy.
‘If we called the police straight away, he said, both of us would be charged – we were both there, DNA from both of us would be on her body. But things looked much worse for me. She was his girlfriend – there was a reason why his DNA would be on her, and people had seen them together at the club on Friday – it wasn’t a secret they’d nipped off for a quickie. And, as he pointed out, it was my flat she’d died in.’
Nick ran his hands over his shaven head and she heard the stubble rasp. ‘Mark said that if we both went to prison, we’d lose everything. DataPro would be finished, and when we got out, we’d be unemployable – no one else would give us jobs. But,’ Nick looked at her, ‘if one of us took the rap, the other could keep DataPro going and then, when the whole thing was over, it would still be there.’
‘I don’t . . .’
‘He said that because DataPro was his, it made sense for him to be the one who ran it. Patty’s death was an accident, it was the drugs and booze that killed her, he said, not anything that either of us had done to her, so the police couldn’t charge me with anything that would carry a long sentence.’