Before We Met(18)
Hannah perched on the chair and rested her head in her hands for a moment, fingers over her ears as if she could block out the voice that way. She was appalled at herself – she was behaving just like her mother in the final weeks before Dad left. Ringing hotels . . . going through desk drawers. It was so sordid, so – grubby. Hannah had promised herself she’d never become that sort of person.
Where’s the file? asked the voice.
All right, she told it, angry now; all right, I’ll look for it. I’ll look for it, find it, and then the mystery will be over, won’t it? Standing, she took a final look around the room and then went downstairs where she checked their bedroom and the two spare rooms. The box-file wasn’t there and nor was it in the sitting room, either under the coffee table or in the bureau or on any of the shelves. In the kitchen she went as far as checking the drawers and cupboards, but she didn’t find it anywhere.
The clock on the cooker said twenty past one; she should have some lunch now if she was going to be ready to eat supper with Tom later. She wasn’t hungry at all, though. Putting her gloves on again, she went back out to the garden and started yanking up weeds and the long strands of grass that were sprouting in the empty tomato trough and round the base of the shrubs next to the wall. After five minutes, however, she stopped.
Where was Mark? In New York, she told herself; the Rome thing was just Neesha’s mistake. Obviously he’d stayed somewhere other than the W this time or, having missed his flight, he hadn’t been able to get another room there and had checked in elsewhere.
If that was the case, though, argued the voice in her ear, shouldn’t he have said which hotel he was at, especially since he’d lost his mobile and the hotel phone was the only way of talking to him? And why the hell hadn’t she asked him? But then, she reasoned, why would she have? She’d assumed he’d be at the W; she’d had no reason to think otherwise.
She remembered the phone call she’d interrupted, the startled look on his face when she’d opened the study door. And now his missing paperwork. She made herself stand straight, shoulders back, and took several long, slow breaths. The sun had gone behind a cloud and, without it, the air was so cold it seared the inside of her nostrils. She was being ridiculous, as hysterical as her mother at her most outrageous. She loved her husband and she knew he loved her. She trusted him and there was no reason not to.
Nonetheless, with a feeling of inevitability she understood that, having let in the element of doubt, she would now have to find the box-file. Until she could look at his bank statements and be sure that he hadn’t hidden them to conceal evidence of money spent on hotels and dinners and presents for someone else – trips to Rome – the nagging, insinuating voice in her head was not going to be quiet.
Chapter Five
DataPro’s offices took up two whole floors of a substantial modern building set back from the river at Hammersmith in the immaculately bland gardens of an upscale business park. He’d started here, Mark had told her, with two rooms: his office and one for his two programmers. Initially he’d leased those on a month-by-month basis but as the business had grown – and grown – the office space had grown with it and he’d added first the suite across the hall, then the one next to it, and the one next to that. The Internet start-up that had moved into the building at the same time and overconfidently signed a ten-year lease on the floor above had gone bust in 2001, and DataPro had taken over their space and now occupied a duplex of more than twelve thousand square feet.
Hannah left her car in Manbre Road and walked round to the entrance to the park. There was no security guard in the booth on Saturdays. She skirted the end of the car-barrier and followed the pavement until she reached the lawn that stretched away from the foot of DataPro’s building to the Thames footpath running directly along the river’s edge. Someone had raked the lawn already today, she saw: though the wind last night had left the silver birch trees almost naked, there was scarcely a stray leaf in sight.
Cold sunlight reflected off the building’s fourteen mirrored glass floors and from the pools of the fountains set either side of the main entrance. Just get it over with, she told herself. Go up there, look, then go home and forget all about it. She took a final galvanising glance at the river then spun in through the revolving doors.
The atrium was a vast marble-floored room from whose distant ceiling hung a sculpture of tangled steel that made her think of space junk, one of those defunct satellites doomed to orbit the earth for ever. The bank of lifts was on the back wall but before them came a line of turnstiles. Without a security pass, there was no way through. Tony, one of the regular doormen, was at the desk, however, his neat grey head bent over the sports pages of the Mirror that he’d smoothed out tidily in front of him. She’d met him several times, first when she was visiting from New York and Mark had brought her in to meet DataPro’s staff, and then pretty regularly since she’d moved back. Tony was employed by the building, not DataPro, but Mark had introduced them that first time and the doorman always recognised her.