Before We Met(69)

‘What? That’s ridiculous.’

‘You think so? It started at school, years before they asked me to give him a job. Nick started going off the rails – he was bunking off and stealing booze from the Spar shop to take down to the beach, then turning up at home after dark half-cut or stoned out of his nut – and that was my fault.’

‘How?’ Again Hannah heard her scepticism.

‘Because I hadn’t checked at break that he was still at school, I hadn’t tipped anyone off that he was missing. You’re the older brother; you have to watch out for him. You have to look after him.’ Mark’s face changed, became sharp and hectoring as he imitated whoever had said it to him. His father? ‘Look after him?’ Mark snorted. ‘Christ, I was the one who needed bloody protecting.’

He turned to look at her, seeking eye contact, and she felt another wave of trepidation. Why was she frightened? She already knew what he was going to say, didn’t she?

When he spoke again, Mark’s voice was quiet. ‘Nick’s cruel, Han – really cruel. We had this neighbour, an old guy, he was a widower, probably in his late seventies, and Nick got a kick out of tormenting him, jumping into his garden at night and creeping round outside his windows. He used to smoke weed in the guy’s shed – totally needless: he always had some grovelling supplicant, male or female, to offer their bedroom for the purpose. Anyway, Jim Thomas, this neighbour, had another shed on his allotment and one night Nick doused the place in petrol and burned it down.’ He shook his head, the memory clearly shocking to him even all these years later.

‘How could I be responsible when stuff like that was going on?’ he said. ‘Stuff that was actually criminal. I was asleep in bed, for God’s sake, getting ready for school in the morning like the good little swot I was. That wasn’t the end of it, either. Jim went to the police, of course, and so my brother killed his dog.’

‘I read about it,’ she admitted.

His eyebrows lifted. ‘Jesus, they really got everything, didn’t they?’

‘There was a lot to get, clearly.’

‘Well, they wouldn’t have had to look very hard, put it that way.’ Mark drained his glass and pushed it away.

‘This is going to sound selfish,’ he said, ‘but after a while, I started thinking, what about me? Who cares about me? Do I exist only to be responsible for Nick? Is that all I am, the boy with his finger in the dam, the bulwark between him and whatever disaster he’s inevitably going to cause? My parents tried to put a spin on it, sell it to me as a good thing, I was the clever, sorted one, noblesse oblige, but it was bullshit and we all knew it. I told you before: Nick’s every bit as clever as me and a lot more cunning.’ He ran the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘I’m just glad that when it happened, the really bad thing we’d been waiting for all those years, my parents were already gone.’

Hannah wrapped her arms around herself, feeling cold to the bone. ‘Tell me about the night it happened.’

‘The bit I’m really ashamed of?’ He exhaled – a quick, resigned sigh. ‘Hannah, all I can say in my defence is, I worked like a slave in my early twenties, at Cambridge then raising the money to start DataPro, getting it off the ground. I didn’t have a life or do anything that normal people do: go to the pub or take holidays. I never had girlfriends – I never met anyone. Even the friends I’d made at university got frustrated at never seeing me and gradually faded into the woodwork.’

Hannah thought of Pippa, how she and Dan hadn’t been friends with Mark at Cambridge but met him later when DataPro worked with Dan’s bank. She’d just assumed they’d been there together.

‘I was twenty-seven when Nick came to work for me and I was ready for a break. Not from work, DataPro was my life, but from the total focus, the non-stop application, the crazy hours. Things were going well, we’d started to make a name for ourselves, I could afford to take it just a bit easier and behave like I wasn’t already fifty. Nick came to work for me – enter the dragon – and you know what? I just thought, fuck it: he’s here earning a great salary in the company that I created, having this luxurious lifestyle for very little effort on his part, plus ça change, so I’m going to have some of what he’s having – some of his kind of fun. Payback time.’

Hannah looked at her husband. His face was so transformed by bitterness that for a moment she didn’t recognise him.

‘So, for a change,’ he said, voice hard, ‘I piggybacked on Nick. I went to his parties and clubs, took his coke, messed around with the sort of girls he hung out with, bought a TVR and drove it through Chelsea late at night smashed off my face like any one of a hundred other wankers. And, I have to say, after five years of living like a monk, I loved it. Apart from some of the more extreme hangovers, it was fun. You know, actually, it was a relief: I was sick of being dedicated and responsible: I wanted to be wild and reckless. Why did I have to be cast in the role of boring bastard all the time? It was my turn.’