Temple, however, had resisted the easy picture of the good-girl-gone-bad and instead asked questions about the expectations of a young woman like Patty, well brought up and attractive if not especially bright. What part did she see for herself in a society where women like her mother, who stayed at home and raised families, were routinely dismissed as pointless non-contributors? The intrinsic value of that role, argued Temple, its respectability, had been eroded to the point of non-existence, to an extent where it was no longer acceptable for a young woman to admit that she wanted to be a full-time mother. And what had replaced that position in the eyes of young women like Patty? A culture obsessed with celebrity and appearance, where the women most venerated in the media, and some of the highest paid, were those who posed for lads’ mags in G-strings, and fell drunkenly out of nightclubs. And the scorn levelled at any young woman perceived as not ‘up for it’ . . . So far from liberating girls like Patty, ladette culture, argued Temple, had enslaved them, turned them into walking, talking sex toys.
Hannah had assumed the piece would continue in the same feminist vein but, somewhat abruptly, the journalist had changed tack and moved on to Nick, who, in the photograph they’d used, appeared deeply tanned and laughing as he swung into the driver’s seat of a silver BMW convertible, a lovely Cotswold-stone house in the background.
In his case, too, it was clear that Temple had researched deeper and harder than the other journalists; there were several details that Hannah knew only because Mark himself had told her that night in New York. The sensational piece in the Gazette had mentioned Eastbourne, quoted old classmates of Nick’s probably contacted by phone, but Temple, it was clear, had been there.
The curtains were drawn this week in the front windows of the two-bedroomed bungalow where Nicholas Reilly spent his childhood, as if his parents, who still live in the house, want to close their eyes against the reality of the crime of which their son was this week found guilty.
Cowering under a matching sky, the small grey pebbledashed bungalow, though immaculately maintained, seems an incongruous location for a boyhood that several who know the family describe as charmed or ‘golden’.
‘Nick was one of those children who seemed destined for a happy life,’ said a family friend who asked to remain anonymous. ‘He was a beautiful baby who grew into a beautiful little boy, always laughing, always smiling. We used to say to Lizzie, his mother, that she should let him be a child model – he would have made a fortune.’
‘He was bright as a button,’ said Leigh Stanton, his first teacher at primary school. ‘Learning came easily to him – he was a joy to teach. He read and wrote early and he was interested in everything. The only challenge was getting him to sit still – he was always restless, full of energy – and telling him off was next to impossible when he looked up at you with those big brown eyes.’
If Reilly’s early childhood was charmed, however, by the time he left junior school, there were troubling signs. Though no one interviewed for this piece was willing to be quoted, a number of people hinted at Elizabeth Reilly’s shyness and lack of confidence, and her emotional reliance on her younger son. Others voiced reservations about the way she lavished attention on the boy and showered him with toys and gifts that many were surprised the family could afford. His brother Mark, a year older, seems not to have been indulged to the same extent.
Perhaps his status as the spoiled younger child contributed to the wild streak that Nick started to exhibit as his teenage years began, or at least to his apparent indifference to the consequences of his actions, alluded to by many people who knew him. That sense of being untouchable – of living outside the rules or even, finally, the law – was to become one of Reilly’s defining characteristics.
The first indication that something was wrong was a falling-off in his attendance record during his third year at secondary school. Truant officers soon became regular visitors to the bungalow. ‘It got to the stage,’ said Matt Trenton, a classmate, ‘where he wasn’t allowed to get the school bus any more and his dad had to drive him and walk him in through the front door, which Nick hated, obviously. It made no difference: by breaktime, he’d be gone, out the door again. He used to hang around down on the beach and drink or smoke weed. Sometimes, he said, he got the train into Brighton to play arcade games.’
At fourteen, he was excluded from school for a week for verbally abusing a teacher who had embarrassed him in front of his classmates.
There were hints, too, of darker troubles. Two long-term residents of his parents’ quiet street remember tensions between Nick and Jim Thomas, an elderly neighbour, now deceased, who took issue with the teenager’s habit of using his back garden as a short-cut to the street behind.