Before We Met(113)

Nick reached across the table and took hold of her hand. He held it tightly and she looked at their fingers, hers pale, his stained at the tips with nicotine. ‘He told me you’d threatened him, too,’ she said. ‘He said you were violent.’

‘Judging by the way you ran the other night, it worked.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He didn’t want you to talk to me, did he? So he scared the living daylights out of you, made sure you’d run a mile the moment you saw me.’

Hannah remembered how urgently Mark had bundled her into the cab outside the pub that night, how he’d made her promise to stay inside the hotel, how he’d gripped her hand when they’d walked to dinner at Mao Tai. The conversation that night – he’d told her Nick had been threatening Hermione, that that was why she’d looked so terrified in the corridor at the hospital, but it was him she’d been scared of. He was the killer.

She closed her eyes again as if she could shut it out, unsee it. She’d loved him, she’d trusted him, and all the time, he’d been working away at a filigree of lies so carefully made it took her breath away.



For a long time they sat in silence. Nick smoked one cigarette after another, slowly filling the saucer with butts, but he didn’t touch the whisky again. Every few seconds, his eyes went to the cheap red mobile, and after a while he began picking it up, pressing buttons to light up the screen, checking, then checking again.

Hannah watched their silhouettes in the glass of the window behind him, the back of his head, her own white face. The cuts around her wrists throbbed and she was grateful: the pain was something to focus on, an anchor in reality. Otherwise, she was floating. She examined her feelings with a sort of detachment. She should have been afraid, she should have been wild with panic, but instead she felt a strange sense of calm. Perhaps it was a protective thing, she thought. Perhaps this was too much for a person to take in at once and her mind had gone into some sort of fugue state. Perhaps, when this was over, she’d have no mental record of any of it.

In an odd way, too, she felt better – clean. For days and days she’d been sifting through his lies, feeling dirtier and dirtier as she dug down through the layers. Now, finally, she could hold it in her hand and lift it up into the light: the hard kernel of truth he had worked so hard to hide.

‘All this because you hate each other,’ she said, breaking the silence.

‘No,’ said Nick, looking up from the phone. ‘Because Mark hates me. He’s hated me from the day I was born.’ He picked the bit of silver cigarette paper from the table and turned it between his fingers. ‘He hated me because my mother loved me. That was my crime back then, when we were babies: I loved my mother and she loved me. Mark couldn’t stand it.’

‘When did you realise? How old were you?’

‘I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘It was a fact of my life, there from the beginning, like having parents and getting bigger and knowing you’d go to school one day. My brother hating me, constantly looking for ways to hurt me.’

Hannah thought of gentle Elizabeth Reilly, and her guilt. ‘Do you think your mother was biased?’ she said.

He rubbed his hand over his head. ‘I don’t know – by the time I was old enough to have any sense of that, it had been going on for years. But even as a small child I remember thinking it was weird, how Mark acted towards her. I used to think about it when I was inside, how fucking terrible it was. He wanted her love so badly, he craved it, but he only wanted it if it was exclusive. There were times I thought he might kill me to get it. Even when we were kids – small kids – I used to think that.’

Yesterday, Hannah thought, she would have laughed at the idea.

‘I used to be careful on railway platforms,’ Nick said, ‘that sort of thing. It sounds ridiculous but I could see it – I could imagine a day when he’d spot the opportunity and take it. You know, the push on the empty platform, no one there to see.’

‘That’s . . . horrific.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s the story of our lives, Mark’s quest to hurt me. If not actually to kill me, then to fuck me up.’ He pressed the phone to light the screen: nothing. ‘As you’ve probably realised,’ he said, ‘Mark’s a master planner. He runs rings round me, he always has – I’m stupid and impulsive, I screw things up, but he . . . he’s like a spider. He makes a web, a big intricate thing, then he sits on it and waits, legs on all the different threads, waiting for a change in the tension, the sign that his prey’s been snared.’