Before We Met(57)

The train pulled in at Parsons Green and Hannah got out. A light drizzle had started to fall while she’d been underground and the paving on the platform was slick and black, the halos around the streetlights smeared against the purple sky. She joined the crush of people filing downstairs towards the barrier. What had Nick done? All the way across London she’d been asking herself the question again and again. Had he been drink-driving again and caused criminal damage – or hit someone? Could it be drugs? She remembered the £10,000 he’d stolen from DataPro’s accounts. What if he’d done that at another company, one at which he didn’t have his brother to let him off without prosecution?

Everyone who’d been on the train, it seemed, was going her way and the pavement outside the station was clogged, a bottleneck forming behind a woman struggling to put up an umbrella. Hannah felt her frustration rising as she was forced to dawdle along behind a couple in matching trenchcoats who were holding hands and strolling as if it was a sunny Sunday afternoon. Come on, come on: she had to get home, get online.

At the White Horse, the couple turned off down Ackmar Road and the congestion started to disperse. Hannah picked up speed, her feet tapping an anxious rhythm past the girls’ school and the large red-brick houses that overlooked the Green. The pavement was dark, the light from the Victorian-style streetlamps struggling to penetrate the dank November air.

Quarrendon Street was deserted, and the sound of traffic on the New King’s Road faded quickly behind her. She opened the front door and the heavy silence inside rushed out to envelop her before she’d even stepped over the threshold. She slammed the door, dumped her coat on the stairs and went through to the kitchen.

Her laptop was on the table and she sat down and pulled it towards her. Suddenly, however, her sense of urgency evaporated and a sickening dread took its place. Standing again, she went to the drawer of odds and ends and took out the half-empty packet of cigarettes that Tom had left behind the last time he came over. She lit one on the gas ring and took it out into the yard where she managed five or six drags before feeling nauseous. She tossed it into the puddle by the stone trough and heard it fizzle and go out.

Back inside, she poured a large measure of the Armagnac Mark had been given by his aerospace client in Toulouse and sat back down at the table. She brought up a new Google window then stopped again. Was information about criminal convictions available online? Was there an official record? Apart from Nick’s name, she had nothing to search by. Where had he been tried? Mark had said he lived in London but who knew if that was true? And how long ago had it happened? How long had his sentence been?

Into the search bar she typed Nick Reilly found guilty. Links to a blog about the guilty pleasures of football and another protesting against the adoption of Sharia law in the UK, then Business Week talking about David Nick Reilly, president of General Motors. On the second page, there was a series of stories about people found guilty of dealing marijuana but all of them were American or Canadian; none was from the UK.

Hannah took a swig of the brandy, deleted Nick and typed in Nicholas. She hit return and waited. This time the first hit was a story in the Daily Mail: Playboy ‘Monster’ Found Guilty of Manslaughter.





Chapter Thirteen

PLAYBOY ‘MONSTER’ FOUND GUILTY OF MANSLAUGHTER



By: Daily Mail reporter

Published: 06.02 GMT, 17 November 2002



Nicholas Reilly was yesterday convicted of the manslaughter of Patricia Hendrick, whose body was discovered at his West London home in March this year.

Hendrick, 25, known by her friends as Patty, died after a 48-hour-sex, drink-and-drugs binge during which Reilly, 28, plied her with alcohol and repeatedly injected her with cocaine.

When Hendrick experienced breathing difficulties and then fell unconscious, Reilly failed to call an ambulance. Hendrick died shortly afterwards.

A post-mortem found the cause of death to be a pulmonary embolism brought on by an impurity in the drug.

At the time of her death Hendrick’s body bore the marks of rough and prolonged sexual activity, including extensive bruising, much of it intimate, and ligature marks around her wrists, ankles and neck.

Over the course of a trial whose details have often been distressing, the jury at the old Bailey heard how in the early hours of 7 March this year, Reilly and Hendrick, who at the time was dating the defendant’s brother, Mark, left the nightclub in East London where they had spent the evening with him and other mutual friends. Both were already drunk and high on cocaine.

The binge continued for two days at Reilly’s home in Chelsea. Reilly admitted giving the deceased large quantities of vodka and tequila and supplying her with repeated doses of amphetamines and cocaine to ‘keep the party going’.