Speaking outside court, Patty’s father, Richard, a wealthy Hertfordshire businessman, described himself and his wife as ‘totally devastated. Patty was the light of our lives. We hope Reilly goes to prison for a very long time.’
Hannah tipped her head back and let the freezing drizzle fall on her cheeks and eyelids. She pulled in long breaths, willing her heart to stop beating so fast; she could feel it knocking behind her sternum as if she was going to have a heart attack. Another wave of nausea went over her, and she crossed the yard and leaned against the little wrought-iron table, bracing herself with her hands. She was hot then cold then hot again, sweating in her clothes but shivering.
She thought of the crimes she’d imagined on the Tube home – fraud, drugs, even the death by drink-driving – and she wanted to laugh: how tame of her, how naïve. But how could she have imagined anything like this? In one of the other tabloid pieces – she’d barely scratched the surface so far; the story had run for days, it seemed, the papers loving this tale of sex and death amongst the young and glamorous – she’d read descriptions of the look of glee on Nick’s face as he’d emptied another syringe into Patty Hendrick’s limp arm, then angled her body towards his hidden camera as he’d pushed her knees apart again. Glee – the word was sickeningly vivid. Reading it, she’d seen him as clearly as if he’d been crouching over her, Hannah, his eyes hungry, mouth wet and open, his sharp incisors just like Mark’s.
Even without the references to Mark and DataPro, even though she’d never seen a picture of him before, she would have known the man in the photographs as his brother straight away. The pictures were ten years old now but looking at them she’d felt as if she were looking at a younger, better-looking version of Mark, the face a little less broad, the eyes just slightly wider-spaced, the mole on his cheek lasered away without a trace. Mark was an excellent prototype – she’d thought he was handsome from the first time she’d clapped eyes on him on the verandah in Montauk – but Nick, it was clear, was the perfected version.
And Patty had been ‘dating’ Mark. What did ‘dating’ mean in British English? Had they been in a relationship? How long had they been seeing each other? What did it matter, so far as what Nick had done? What kind of person even entertained the idea of a woman his brother was involved with or had even expressed interest in? The kind of person who let his sixty-year-old mother work in a shop to fund his post-college lifestyle, answered the voice at the back of her head. Who showed naked pictures of his girlfriend around school. The kind of person who could watch a woman fight for her life and not ring an ambulance.
Hannah’s stomach gave a sudden heave and she dashed back across the yard and wrenched the door open. She made it to the downstairs lavatory just in time. Afterwards, empty, she closed her eyes and rested her forehead on the cold china rim of the hand basin. That poor woman, she thought, poor, lost Patty. To die like that, drugged out of your mind, filmed naked, alone with a leering, conscienceless horror of a man who’d stand by and watch you die rather than deal with the consequences of calling for help.
The papers had had several different pictures of her and, if the Internet page layouts were anything to go by, they’d printed them big. No surprise there: she was perfect for that kind of story, any kind of story, with her long straight blonde hair and wide green eyes that at first glance seemed innocent but then revealed a glint of invitation. She was slim but curvaceous, still young enough at twenty-five that the curves suggested puppy fat in the best of ways, a toothsome, almost succulent plumpness. Two of the most frequently featured photographs looked as if they’d been taken on the same night and showed her in a simple black dress with cap sleeves that she’d pulled in at the waist with a thick patent-leather belt whose studs and heavy double buckle were perfect visual shorthand for what she’d been into the weekend she died, if not ever before.
Hannah thought about the photograph Mark had described but never shown her, the one of him and his brother as boys on the beach in Devon: Nick the golden child, Mark with his wasp sting and too-tight trunks, his ice-cream cone dropped in the sand. She imagined him in the club that night, coming back from the bar carrying a drink for Patty to discover that she’d left with his brother, and she felt a rush of pity for him, an intense, bitter sadness. In seconds, however, it was gone, replaced by anger. How could he not have told her? This was so huge, so fundamental. Something like this must be scored into his psyche; a day couldn’t pass when he didn’t think about it. What kind of a wife was she to him that he’d never told her – that he’d left her to find out like this from a friend she’d never even heard of?