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Before We Met(31)

By:Lucie Whitehouse


‘Don’t worry about it all so much,’ he said. ‘Take a risk: trust someone. Let them trust you.’



As she hurried along Shaftesbury Avenue towards Chinatown, now almost half an hour late, Hannah thought about what she was going to say, or if she was going to say anything at all. She wanted to – she needed to get this stuff out, stop it churning around in her head – and she wanted Tom’s perspective on it, his calm good sense. But what she really wanted, she knew, was for him to tell her that she was overreacting and there would be a simple explanation for it all, and in her heart she knew he wouldn’t do that. However much she wanted him to, Tom wouldn’t lie to her; he never had.

And if she told him about Rome and Mark’s phone being lost and his not being at his hotel and the missing – taken – money, it would all be out in the open. Real. And it could still be all right, couldn’t it? There might still be a simple explanation – and then she would have made Tom think badly of Mark for nothing. And, said the voice in her head before she could stop it, you’d have made him think he was right all along.



‘So, as you can see, I’m in a bit of a tight spot.’

Hannah picked a fragment of prawn cracker off the paper tablecloth and pressed it between her fingers until it turned into greasy dust. ‘But if you’ve kept quiet about it so far,’ she said, ‘why say something now?’

‘Well, that’s it.’ Tom dragged his hand through his hair, which was in need of a cut to prevent it from veering off into Leo Sayer territory. It was a perennial hazard: he had next to no interest in matters of the appearance and relied on the women in his life – their mother, Hannah and now Lydia – to tell him when he was getting beyond the pale. Lydia had been working away a lot recently.

‘Hair,’ Hannah said.

‘Really? Already? I had it done . . .’

‘Last year?’

He made an all-right-smart-arse face. ‘No, the thing is, Paul told me yesterday that someone’s pointed the finger at one of the cleaning staff. She’s Indian, I think, maybe Pakistani. Anyway, if it goes on she’ll get fired – I don’t think her English is good enough for her to mount much of a defence, frankly, and—’

‘So you have to say something. And if this guy Luke took the money, if you’re sure you saw him . . .’

‘I’m sure. He knows I did, too. I backed out of there as fast as I could but he saw me. And – God, it’s dreadful – he keeps giving me these pathetically grateful looks, as if he owes me everything.’

‘Well, he kind of does, doesn’t he, if you’re keeping it under your hat?’ Hannah pulled the last tissue-thin strip of damp paper from round the neck of her bottle of Tsingtao. Stolen money, she thought, more stolen money. Taken – she corrected herself.

‘He’s got two kids already, his wife’s pregnant. If he’s fired for pinching the trip money – it was three hundred pounds – what’s he going to do? He’ll never get another teaching job.’

Hannah looked at her brother, the two vertical lines scored between his eyebrows. ‘You have to say something,’ she said. ‘You can’t let an innocent woman take the rap.’

He sighed. ‘I know. And I realise it’s not much of a dilemma. I just feel shitty about it.’

‘Think of it the other way round. She might have kids, too. She might be supporting her whole family.’

‘If no one had suggested it was her, I would have let the thing lie. But you’re right, I can’t now. I’ll talk to the Head on Monday.’

The waiter came to clear their dumpling plates and set their chopsticks on little china rests. With the side of his hand he swept away the curling shreds of Hannah’s label.

‘You’ll feel better when you’ve done it,’ she said after the waiter had disappeared.

Tom sighed. ‘I doubt it.’ He nodded at the empty bottle. ‘Another one?’

The label gone, she went back to the remains of the prawn cracker, bisecting them with her thumbnail until the pieces became indivisible. There was that thing, wasn’t there, about how often you could fold something in half; was it the same for cutting or did that work differently? She thought about Mark’s hands and how she’d used to watch them at the beginning – still did. They were always moving, always playing with something. Whenever she went out to dinner with him there’d always be some perfectly crafted little thing on the table by the time they finished. Once at the Italian place near her old apartment he’d made a miniature horse from the aluminium round the top of the wine bottle. She’d kept it and put it in her jewellery box. She’d looked at it yesterday.