Before We Met(61)
She turned her head to look at the clock on the bedside table. 02.47. What was Mark doing now? He’d be on the plane, either in the air or just taking off. He might be asleep already: even if he’d adjusted to New York time in the past few days, he was one of those people who had the gift of sleeping any time, anywhere, making dead hours count. If they took a night flight together, he would arrive fresh and well rested while she, having worked her way through the films and strained to read by the overhead spotlight, always pitched up at the other end looking like the subject of some sort of clinical trial. And what would be keeping him awake, anyway? He had no idea she knew about any of this.
She turned over, away from the window and the demonic red glow of the clock, closed her eyes and tried again to find a comfortable position. Now her arm was the problem, uncomfortable tucked under her body, awkward held out in front. The real issue, however, was her mind, which was racing despite everything she’d done to try to switch off. She’d made up this bed with fresh sheets, watched an hour of mindless TV and had a warm bath, with her old copy of Our Man in Havana. She loved the book, she’d read it several times, but tonight her eyes kept sliding away from the page and none of the jokes made her smile.
Before that, though, she’d been reading all evening. She’d deleted Mark’s email without responding then gone back to the computer and read article after article until her eyes ached from screen glare. Every new fact repulsed her, the words leaping out in all their tabloid horror – death! sado-masochism! ligatures! cocaine! – yet still she clicked on the next piece with the fervour of an addict.
In abbreviated form, the story had even reached some of the foreign newspapers. How the hell had she missed it at the time? Maybe she hadn’t completely; maybe she’d seen the headlines and decided she didn’t need to read the rest, all the prurient details about the playboy and the party-girl and the sticky ends they’d come to. And Reilly was pretty common as surnames went; there was no reason why it would have rung a bell when she’d met Mark. But it was also possible she hadn’t seen the coverage at all. When she’d been working really hard, finishing a big project, she’d sometimes gone weeks without more than a cursory glance at the papers for anything relevant to what she was working on.
Tonight she’d read coverage from broadsheets and tabloids, the websites of TV channels and news magazines, until after a while she’d thought there were no more grim details to discover. Then, just as she was about to force herself to turn off the computer, she’d found a feature-length story published in the news review section of a Sunday broadsheet the weekend after Nick’s conviction. The headline was A Death in Chelsea.
The piece started with a portrait of Patty, many of the details now so familiar to Hannah that she was beginning to feel as if she’d actually known her growing up: her father’s job as the chief executive of an electronics company in Hemel Hempstead; her stay-at-home mother and her brother, Seb, two years younger and identified as a future track star by the age of ten; the six-bedroomed house in a small village outside St Albans, with its swimming pool and the long paddock where Patty kept her ponies, Mischief and then Gorgeous Gus. Hannah knew about the gymkhanas and the summer sailing camps and the house in the Dordogne that Richard and Lara Hendrick had bought when their daughter was twelve, and she knew about the mediocre grades that made it obvious from early on that Patty’s childhood dream of becoming a vet would stay a dream.
The fact that she had been a willing sexual partner at the beginning of that nightmarish weekend had deterred the papers that trumpeted their ‘family values’ from the usual hagiography of the victim, but this journalist, Carole Temple, had talked to several childhood friends who described Patty’s tender heart and many acts of generosity. One told the story of how she’d started visiting an elderly widow in the village and then, when she’d learned that the woman loved books but was losing her sight, had begun reading to her every Sunday afternoon.
While pretending pity, most of the other pieces had related Patty’s fall from grace with relish, detailing her friendship with the ‘wilder element’ at her exclusive but not very academic girls’ school, the slipping of her grades, her experimentation – why did they always use that word? – with alcohol and marijuana. At that point, many of the articles made it sound as if the die were irrevocably cast, as if every teenage girl who’d ever taken a drag on an inexpertly rolled spliff in the company of a few sixth-form boys from the local comprehensive had set themselves on a road to perdition whose only destination was an early demise at the hands of a Bad Man.