Before We Met(114)

Hannah wrapped her arms around herself.

‘He’s a genius at it, actually. The long game. That’s why he never pushed me under the 2.10 from Brighton – it would have been over too quickly. More fun for him to see how he could screw me up over years and years. It was him who got me into drugs – he knew my personality, how easy I find it to get hooked. He could do it: smoke a bit of weed, take some E, get hold of the good stuff and make sure I was getting really into it, then stop. Meanwhile, there was I with a brand-new habit. You could count the number of times he did coke on your fingers, probably, but I . . . Well, it really messed me up. It wasn’t just . . . what happened. Before that, for years, I was hopeless. I lost job after job, barely scraped through my degree – there were days I just couldn’t get out of bed. And it wrecked me financially, of course – swallowed every penny I managed to earn.’

‘What about Jim Thomas?’ Hannah said. ‘Your neighbour.’

Nick looked at her. ‘Jim?’

‘What happened to his dog, the one that drowned? The papers said you did it but your mother told me it was a misunderstanding.’

‘No misunderstanding. Mark drowned Molly. He hated Jim, absolutely hated him – Jim was wise to him and he knew it.’

‘Your mother says you – the two of you – found her drowned.’

‘No, I found her drowned. I’d been with this girl after school and I was coming home the back way near the stream. Mark had put her in a bag with stones – when I came along he was cutting her out of it. I waded in but . . .’

‘Then why did people think you did it?’

‘Because I was the one with the wild reputation – the girls, the drugs, bunking off school.’

Hannah frowned. ‘Why didn’t you say something?’

‘Because he told me that if I did, he’d grass me up for selling weed at school, which I was doing. You see? This was what he was so good at – he knew everything, calculated everything. And everything could be tied back in to something else. The spider’s web.’

Hannah pointed at his cigarettes. ‘Can I?’

He pushed them across the table with his lighter. ‘He used to make out that I was some sort of wild animal – stupid, uncivilised. A brute.’ He took the packet back and got one out for himself. ‘Of course, the irony is, I am a brute now – ten years in prison brutalised me.’ He lit the cigarette, pulled smoke into his lungs and let it out in a long thin stream. ‘It was . . . if I imagined hell, I’d imagine prison. Wakefield’s where they keep the sex offenders, the rapists. It wasn’t Ford, with Jeffrey Archer knocking out a novel and a load of dodgy MPs playing ping-pong. No one warns you about the noise – all day, all night, the banging and knocking and shouting and singing, metal doors slamming, buzzers. I shared cells with people who were illiterate, disturbed. Ten years without privacy, counting the hours until you could go to bed and say you’d done another day. Not that there was sleep, even then. There was this one time . . .’

He stopped and she saw his whole body stiffen. Echoing through the house came the sound of the doorbell.





Chapter Twenty-six

Hannah worked her fingers between the tie and the leg of her jeans and pulled as hard as she could. The plastic cut her, sending a line of pain through the pads of her fingers, but it didn’t give at all. She tightened her grip. It wouldn’t break but if she could stretch it enough, maybe she could get her foot through. Clenching her jaw, she tried again, leaning back in the chair, pulling with as much of her body weight as she could. Come on, come on – please. Nothing. It wouldn’t budge.

He was leaning on the doorbell now and it rang through the house like an alarm, shrill and constant. ‘All right, all right,’ Nick shouted, and then, seconds later, she heard Mark’s voice.

‘If you’ve touched her, you fucking little germ . . .’

‘You’ll do what?’ Nick said. ‘Set me up for murder? Have me thrown in jail?’

‘Where is she?’

The sound of quick footsteps down the hallway. Hannah yanked at the tie again, almost tipping herself forward out of the chair, tears of frustration in her eyes. She tried standing again but the ties were too tight: she couldn’t straighten her legs.

‘Hannah.’

Mark stood framed in the doorway, the mouth of the corridor dark behind him. She was seized by terror. He was wearing jeans and his black jumper, the outfit she’d watched him put on in the hotel room that morning, but it was as if she’d never seen him before. Who was he, this stranger? This rapist. This killer. She saw him look at the ties round her ankles and then at her hand, and when she followed his glance, she saw that her palm was covered in blood.