Scrolling down, however, Hannah found another photograph, this one taken from much closer range. Here Hermione Alleyn was standing next to a large, jovial-looking man in his late fifties, perhaps early sixties, with a thicket of salt-and-pepper beard and a heavy paw on her shoulder. Her face was fully visible. She had widely spaced pale eyes and a straight nose above a mouth with a full lower lip. Her ears, adorned with plain pearl studs, protruded enough to make her look a bit goofy and she was smiling in embarrassment, as if her companion or the photographer had just paid her an extravagant compliment. Glancing down, Hannah saw a caption: Hermione Alleyn with Geoffrey Landis, Professor of Nephrology at the University of Cambridge. Landis describes Alleyn as his ‘right-hand man’ in his groundbreaking research project at Addenbrooke’s Hospital.
Hannah sat back in her chair and the silence flooded round her again, squeezing the oxygen from the air. Her chest felt tight; she was breathing like her brother did just before he had an asthma attack. For a minute or so she concentrated, forcing herself to exhale slowly, to stop gulping for another breath before she’d emptied her lungs of the one before; then, leaning forward, she opened a new window and typed in ‘Hermione Alleyn’ and ‘St Botolph’s’, the name of Mark’s college at Cambridge.
No results. Deleting Hermione’s name, she typed in ‘Geoffrey Landis’ instead. The first link took her to a page on a college website. As well as being the university’s Professor of Nephrology, she read, he was a fellow and tutor at St Botolph’s. Bingo. It was her: it had to be. Even if she wasn’t the only Hermione Alleyn in the UK, the name was unusual enough that the St Botolph’s connection couldn’t be a coincidence. If this man Landis taught there, wasn’t it likely that Hermione had met him as a student and then later, as a high-flyer, been an obvious recruit for his ‘groundbreaking research project’? And she was the right age; if not quite forty like Mark then certainly within two or three years of him, close enough for their years at college to have overlapped.
Hannah stood up abruptly, scraping the chair across the slate floor tiles. Light-headed, hands shaking, she unlocked the French windows and flung them open. In the yard she moved clear of the shadow of the house then tipped her head back and pulled in lungfuls of the bitter air. The sky overhead was the pitiless blue she’d predicted.
If they’d met at Cambridge, they’d known each other twenty years. Was Hermione an old flame, someone he’d been in love with then, now back in the picture? The idea caused Hannah a wash of despair: how could she, some woman who’d known Mark a year and a half, compete with someone who’d known him so long, who’d known his friends then and all the stories and in-jokes, who’d shared one of the formative parts of his life? She, Hannah, hadn’t been to Oxbridge; she didn’t know that world with all its rituals and august ancient customs, its exclusivity.
But how could she compete with someone like Hermione Alleyn at all? asked the unkind voice in her head. In her job – when she’d even had one – all she’d done was think up inventive ways to flog things people didn’t want, concocting adverts that wormed their way into their brains, forced themselves upon them like a randy mongrel when all they wanted was to read a magazine or watch TV. How could that compare with being a surgeon, performing transplants, life-saving surgery? This woman was impressive by anyone’s standards.
But then, said the voice, Mark was never going to take up with a bimbo, was he, some over-bleached, half-witted soap addict? Mark liked bright women; Laura, she’d discovered when she pressed him, had some high-powered job in a government think-tank on defence. He liked the stimulus, the challenge. If he were in love with someone else – If? said the voice – or even if he were just sleeping with her, it would be because she intrigued him, made him laugh, made him think. It would be about her brain as much as her face or body though Hermoine wasn’t unattractive, either, far from it. She looked clever, sharp-eyed, self-deprecating. The kind of person you would like.
Chapter Ten
It was eighteen stops from Parsons Green, direct, no changes, and in the hour she’d been underground, her face composed into its neutral, big-city, don’t-engage expression, Hannah had been buffeted by anger so powerful it was incredible that no one among the scores of people who’d joined the train and got off again had seemed to feel it.
A few minutes before she’d left the house, she’d called Mark’s mobile. She hadn’t really expected an answer, of course, but the sound of the calm but firm female voice telling her that the person she was calling was not available enraged her. The last traces of protective shock had burned away in a surge of fury so strong she’d felt dizzy, and she’d had to sit down until the pounding in her head started to subside. Then she’d stood up again and paced the kitchen, her hands shaking, itching to do violence. The milk jug had been on the draining board, and before she could stop herself, her arm had reached out and swept it to the floor. The smash had satisfied the rage for a moment but within seconds it was rising up inside her again.