Before We Met(112)

‘And you just swallowed all this?’

‘I didn’t just swallow it,’ Nick said angrily. ‘I’m stupid but I’m not that bloody stupid. I made a calculation. Either way, I knew I was going to be in deep shit. I mean, if you’ve read about it, you know all the gory details – I wasn’t going to get off scot-free whatever happened. I gave her the drugs; she was in my house; there were . . . marks on her: I was going to jail. Mark told me that if I kept quiet about him ever being at my place that afternoon, he would pay me a dividend from DataPro when I got out.’

‘How much?’ she said, though she already knew.

‘Two million.’

Hannah closed her eyes for a moment. ‘You don’t own any shares at all, do you?’ she said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He told me that you owned twelve per cent of the company; that you invested your share of your parents’ estate – quarter of a million.’

‘Estate? Our parents aren’t dead.’

‘I know that now,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t until today. Mark told me that you’d invested your inheritance and the two million was to buy you out.’

Nick expelled a short burst of air. ‘I wish.’ He opened the pack of cigarettes again and took out another. He lit it and took a deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs. ‘What would you have done, in my shoes?’ he said. ‘I was going to jail anyway, and if I did it this way, there’d be money waiting when I got out, enough to keep me going for the rest of my life even if no one gave me a job ever again. I told myself that serving the sentence would be my job: I’d put the time in and then I’d get paid. It made sense.’

‘It would if you thought you were only going down for a couple of years,’ she said.

He tipped his head. ‘I didn’t think they’d charge me with manslaughter.’

‘Why didn’t you say something, when they did?’

‘I never thought I’d get ten years. My lawyer said it would be three or four – Patty was a grown-up, she’d known what she was doing. With time off for good behaviour, and parole . . . So I went along with it. Only to be shafted by Mark yet again.’

‘You mean . . .’

‘He’s not paying me.’ Nick stared at her. ‘Whatever reason he gave you for coming to Wakefield, he lied. He came to tell me I could have two hundred and fifty thousand – an eighth of what we’d agreed – take it or leave it.’

Her savings and his own and the new mortgage.

‘And if you left it?’

‘If I didn’t accept the “new terms”, as he called them, he said he’d make sure I was back in prison before my feet touched the ground. All my life,’ Nick said, ‘he’s been trying to take what’s mine. However much he’s got, it’s not enough – he’s not happy unless I’ve got nothing. The day he came to visit me – the second time – he even walked off with my bloody cigarettes.’

Hannah went cold again. ‘Did he tell you how he was going to have you put back in prison?’

‘He mentioned Hermione – I think it was the only thing he could think of. In court she said some stuff about our sex life that was a bit . . .’

‘You hadn’t been in touch with her? You didn’t threaten her?’

‘What?’

‘Nick, Hermione’s dead.’

He stared at her and the cigarette dropped from between his fingers. If there’d been any doubt left in Hannah’s mind, one look at him now would have put paid to it.

‘Dead?’ he said, and his voice had gone faint. ‘Are you . . . ? You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?’

‘She was attacked near the hospital, on her way home – battered to death. She died of head injuries.’

‘When?’

‘Thursday afternoon – late afternoon. Nick, they found a pack of cigarettes with your fingerprints on at the scene.’

He made a terrible sound in his throat as if he were bringing up some deep, integral part of himself, but Hannah barely registered it. Mark had killed Hermione – Mark. He’d planned it – set out to do it in cold blood. Her mind went scrambling back over everything he’d told her, everything that had happened. She remembered that evening – she’d seen Nick outside the delicatessen and Mark had come tearing back across London to find her. Where had he been? He’d left that message on Hermione’s phone at quarter to nine; he’d stood in their sitting room and left a message for a woman he knew was dead – he’d made a joke: ‘Hannah . . . my wife – I think you’ve met.’ Now she remembered his weird, nervous energy, his white knuckles on the poker as he’d jabbed at the fire. Oh, God – he’d kissed her; he’d pushed her against the wall and tried to have sex with her. And the next day, when the police had come, the way he’d trembled . . . She’d taken it for shock, grief, but he must have thought they’d come for him. Hannah retched and retched again. He’d killed a woman – not just a woman: a friend. He’d come home from beating a woman to death and tried to have sex with her.