As she closed the front door, silence swallowed her. The house was always quiet – sometimes when she was here during the day she’d put on Radio 4 just for the sound of voices – but this was different. Since she’d left this morning, swinging out of the house at twenty to eight buoyed by sleep and coffee, the silence had taken on weight, and though it was noon now, the house was dark, as if daylight was struggling to penetrate the windows. The stairs climbed away into a soupy gloom, and she had the idea that the place was withdrawing from her, taking sides. She’d be leaving it soon, moving out.
She dumped her coat over the banisters and went through to the kitchen where she sat down at the table and fired up her laptop. She’d put off this moment for more than three hours, first at the café and then in Bishops Park, where she’d walked back and forth along the river path in a daze. She paused for a final few seconds, hands steepled in front of her face, then took a breath and plunged.
‘Hermione Alleyn’ brought up eight pages of results. She scanned the first and at the bottom saw a link to a directory enquiries site. The text below said, ‘We have found 1 person in the UK with the name Hermione Alleyn.’ The name was hyperlinked but when she clicked on it, she was told she’d have to register if she wanted to use the site. The same page came up when she tried the link to the address.
She went back to the list of results. The two entries at the top were for LinkedIn, but when she clicked on them, the page showed no further information. The third, though, was the site of a specialist medical journal on nephrology. Nephrology? Kidneys? Here Hermione Alleyn and Asif Akbar were listed as co-authors of an article describing a refinement to a technique in transplant surgery for patients with post-traumatic kidney failure. The link offered only a stub of the article but at the bottom she found a brief biography of the two authors. Hermione Alleyn, it said, was currently a consultant surgeon in nephrology and hepatology at the Royal London Hospital.
Was she a doctor, this woman? A surgeon? Hannah opened a new window and brought up the Royal London’s site. She clicked on a button at the top titled ‘Our Services’ and scanned down until she found a link to the Renal Centre. Clicking that, she was invited to ‘Meet The Team’. At the top of the list was Hermione Alleyn, Consultant Transplant Surgeon. There was a telephone number – a switchboard or receptionist, apparently: the same number appeared next to three or four other names – and an email address.
Was this her? There was no photograph – this woman, this obviously senior surgeon, could be sixty. Was the directory site right when it said there was only one Hermione Alleyn in the UK? Perhaps it meant there was only one Hermione Alleyn with a landline number or even a number that wasn’t ex-directory. And what was there to say she was in the UK at all? Mark had met her, Hannah, overseas; he might have done the same this time, too. This time.
She swallowed the lump in her throat and went back to her first search. There were ten or fifteen different links to articles and papers written by the nephrologist; whoever she was, she was clearly big news in kidneys. At the bottom of the fourth page there was a link to Facebook, but when Hannah clicked it, the page was the blank one for people who took their privacy settings very seriously, all photographs and personal information reserved for friends, the profile picture just the generic outline of a female head. If the nephrologist was sixty, would she have a Facebook page? Why not? Lots of older people did, and they tended to be more careful about privacy than the daft young, who laid it all out there for teachers and employers and university tutors to peruse at their leisure. As a surgeon, too, she’d want to keep her private life private.
Hannah closed Facebook and went back to the list. More articles in various medical publications and then, on the sixth page of hits, a link referring to a nephrology conference in San Diego two years previously at which this Hermione Alleyn had given a paper. Hannah went to the page without any real expectation but when it opened, there was a small photograph of a woman stepping out from behind a lectern. She was young or youngish, not sixty but thirty-five or forty. The picture wouldn’t enlarge so Hannah pulled her computer closer. Light brown hair, a little above shoulder-length, cut into a bob she’d tucked behind her ears. Hannah peered, trying to make out the woman’s face, but the photograph had been taken from a distance and it was impossible to gain much of an impression beyond one of general attractiveness. She was slim and dressed in a black suit, the skirt knee-length and fitted, though even at this remove obviously not quite as well cut as Neesha’s this morning. White shirt, black court shoes.