Before We Met(26)

She thought about his financial paperwork. She should have brought it back with her and gone through it here, line by line. She’d looked as carefully as she could in the office but she’d been too flustered, too shocked. Unlike her, as far as she knew, Mark wasn’t stupid enough to keep a written record of all his banking passwords so she couldn’t access his accounts online. She’d have to wait until tonight, somehow make sure David had left the office and then go back there. Unless . . .

On the hall table was the pile of Mark’s post. Hadn’t there been a letter for him from Coutts this morning? She ran into the hall, picked up the pile and flicked through it. Yes, here it was. She dropped the rest of the letters and clutched it to her chest. It was just a normal window envelope, plain white paper, not one of the glossy pamphlet things advertising a promotion. It would be a letter about his account or a statement. She hesitated. They never opened one another’s post – why would they? And if she opened this now, she’d have to get rid of it afterwards: she wouldn’t be able to explain having opened it.

She looked at it a second longer then stuck her finger under the flap and ripped the envelope apart. Inside were three sheets of paper, his monthly statement. Her eyes ran down the transactions but nothing jumped out: no big transfers, no bookmakers, no La Perla or hotels. But if Mark were staying at hotels with another woman, she realised, he’d pay on his DataPro card so there’d be no risk of her seeing. She felt a rising sense of hopelessness. The statements for his business accounts went straight to the office; it would be nearly impossible for her to access them.

Back in the kitchen, she smoothed the statement out on the table and went through it item by item, Biro in hand. There were the new shirts, the gas bill, their supper at Mao Tai last Tuesday, the tickets for La Bohème. There was a payment to the delicatessen at the top of the street, and then the butcher’s shop next door for the ribs of beef they’d had a couple of weeks ago. Lea & Sandeman, the wine merchants, and the private gym Mark used in Chelsea; £25 to W. H. Smith at Heathrow Terminal Three, for books, no doubt. She could identify almost everything, and by the time she reached the end there were only two transactions with Biro crosses next to them: a payment on the second page to someone or something called Trowell and then, near the bottom of page three, another to or at ‘Woodall’.

Reaching for her laptop, she typed ‘Trowell’ into Google. The first hit was a link to Wikipedia, the snippet of text underneath telling her that Trowell was a village in Nottinghamshire. She scanned down, seeing links to a garden centre, a definition of ‘trowel’ in an online dictionary, and then links to social networking sites and people with the surname Trowell. She looked back at the statement. There were no initials, no obvious indication that the payment had been made to a person, though that didn’t rule it out.

She typed in ‘Woodall’. This time the first hit was a link to a site of motorway service stations. She skimmed down the page. The next was a Wikipedia entry for William Woodall, politician, 1832–1901, and the third another Wikipedia entry, this one for Woodall, ‘a small hamlet in the civil parish of Harthill, with Woodall situated in the metropolitan borough of Rotherham, South Yorkshire, UK’.

She went back to the search bar at the top and added ‘Trowell’. When she hit return this time, the first thing she saw was a link to a trivia site, and a line of text underneath that read: ‘Which motorway has service stations named Woodall, Trowell and Tibshelf?’ The answer, which appeared straight after the question, eliminating any fun to be had in guessing, was the M1.

Hannah stood up and went to the pinboard. She unhooked the calendar and brought it back to the table. The payment at Trowell had gone out on 12 October, the one at Woodall on 26 October, both Fridays. In the little squares for both days, Mark’s large, confident handwriting read Germany – Frankfurt.





Chapter Seven

Though it was nearly eight o’clock, Knightsbridge was still clogged with traffic, no more than two or three cars at a time making it through the lights. The couple in the seat in front were riding the bus like a bumper-car, leaning against each other, their feet up on the plastic ledge that separated them from the glass expanse of the enormous windshield, his feet encased in grimy trainers, hers bare in a pair of canary, yellow patent-leather heels that Hannah, feeling like an old woman, thought she’d regret within the hour. Thermals from the heater underneath their seat carried back a woody, masculine scent that Hannah recognised as Gillette body-spray: she’d had a boyfriend at college for a week or two who’d worn it.